The Panopticon Review

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:45:53 +0000

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF CHUCK BERRY. (b. October 18, 1926--d. March 18, 2017)

Today, October 20, 2026 we feature the life, art, and legacy of the iconic and legendary musician, composer, songwriter, arranger, poet, playwright, singer, teacher, producer, and activist Chuck Berry--The undisputed KING OF ROCK ‘N ROLL–Part 1

https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2015/07/chuck-berry-b-october-18-1926-legendary.html

PHOTO: CHUCK BERRY (1926-2017)

A CELEBRATION OF AND IN HOMAGE AND GRATITUDE TO THE LIFE AND WORK OF CHUCK BERRY (b. October 18, 1926--d. March 18, 2017)

All,

So dig yall. Check this out. Last night (March 17) my beloved wife and I were actually having a very spirited, intense, wide ranging, dynamic, and HEAVY discussion about the sheer beauty, wit, power, humor, intelligence, creative imagination and awe inspiring/mind boggling GENIUS of a man whose name at birth was Charles Edward Anderson Berry, later known to the entire spinning globe as CHUCK, one of the most important, influential, and enduring ARTISTS of the past century bar none. REMEMBER: This is the man who along with such brilliantly talented colleagues, comrades, and fellow straightup revolutionary black cultural subversives as Little Richard, Otis Blackwell, Bo Diddley, Wynonie Harris, Big Mama Thornton, Ruth Brown, Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Louis Jordan, The Trenier Brothers, etc. etc. who actually INVENTED, yes INVENTED what everyone now calls ROCK AND ROLL and we in the so-called "urban zones" called JUMP MUSIC (among many other things)...

THE POINT is this (and it should NEVER be forgotten or ignored or dismissed on any level whatsoever): WITHOUT the great CHUCK BERRY there is no Beatles, no Rolling Stones, no Bob Dylan, no John Lennon, no Elvis, no Jimi Hendrix, no Bruce Springsteen, no major (or minor) rock or pop musician, composer, songwriter, singer, performer, poet, or philosopher. PERIOD. He was the premeire foundational artistic and social template of 20th/21st century popular music long before anyone knew or acknowledged there was any such thing...

So forget about the following typically cheesy bullshit phony baloney obit from the "mainstream" press (I mean, get real folks, it's only the NY Times, afterall). In any event it doesn't come anywhere close to informing the reader or justly "explaining" just exactly how and why CHUCK BERRY was and is and will always be so damn important to not only music but art making in general as we know it in what we all archly refer to as "the modern world." So stay tuned in the following blizzard of posts I will be making available in this social media space over the next 24 hours. And oh yeah LISTEN TO THE MUSIC and tell your friends and other loved ones or just mere acquaintances what the big noise is all about here. In the meantime THANK YOU BROTHER BERRY. Your music and your creative style changed the world and our understanding of it and ourselves which what we arrogantly call ART at its very damn best always does...RIP forever "brown eyed handsome man"...

Kofi

March 18, 2017
The New York Times
NYTimes.com »
Breaking News Alert

BREAKING NEWS

Chuck Berry, whose distinctive guitar licks, duckwalks and songs about girls and cars helped define rock 'n' roll, has died at 90

Saturday, March 18, 2017

6:25 PM EDT

Chuck Berry, who with his indelible guitar licks, brash self-confidence and memorable songs about cars, girls and wild dance parties did as much as anyone to define rock ’n’ roll’s potential and attitude in its early years, died on Saturday. He was 90.

The St. Charles County Police Department in Missouri confirmed his death on its Facebook page. The department said it responded to a medical emergency at a home and he was declared dead after lifesaving measures were unsuccessful.

While Elvis Presley was rock’s first pop star and teenage heartthrob, Mr. Berry was its master theorist and conceptual genius, the songwriter who understood what the kids wanted before they did themselves. With songs like “Johnny B. Goode” and “Roll Over Beethoven,” he gave his listeners more than they knew they were getting from jukebox entertainment.

Read more »

https://www.nytimes.com/20…/…/18/arts/chuck-berry-dead.html…

Music

"If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."

--John Lennon

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/chuck-berry-wins-prestigious-polar-music-prize-20140508

Chuck Berry Wins Prestigious Polar Music Prize
Rock pioneer joins past winners Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen

by Kory Grow
May 8, 2014
Rolling Stone

Chuck Berry Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Chuck Berry will be honored with the Polar Music Prize this year at a ceremony in Stockholm in late August. The rock pioneer, whose hits "Johnny B. Goode," "Maybelline" and "Roll Over Beethoven," among others, defined guitar playing for a generation, will receive £100,000 (a little more than $169,600) at the ceremony, which Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf will attend, the U.K.'s Telegraph reports. The award was founded by late Abba manager, lyricist and publisher Stig Anderson, who wanted it to "break down musical boundaries by bringing together people from all the different worlds of music." As such, 2014's other Polar recipient is opera and theater director Peter Sellars.

100 Greatest Guitarists: David Fricke on Chuck Berry

Past recipients have included Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, BB King, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Bruce Springsteen and Quincy Jones, among others. Paul McCartney was the first Polar Music Prize recipient in 1992; the other recipient in its inaugural year was the Baltic States, in honor of the region's national music culture. "The difference with this one for me is that I've presumably been chosen from everyone in the world," McCartney said at the ceremony. "You can't knock that, that's a high honor. They could have chosen all sorts of other people, I can think of a few people who you could choose for a music honor like this."

Part of Berry's Polar Music Award citation reads, "Every riff and solo played by rock guitarists over the last 60 years contains DNA that can be traced right back to Chuck Berry. The Rolling Stones, the Beatles and a million other groups began to learn their craft by playing Chuck Berry songs."

https://www.chuckberry.com/biography
Chuck Berry
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Chuck Berry’s music has transcended generations. He earns respect to this day because he is truly an entertainer. Berry, also known as “The Father of Rock & Roll," gained success by watching the audience’s reaction and playing accordingly, putting his listeners’ amusement above all else. For this reason, tunes like “Johnny B. Goode,” “Maybellene” and “Memphis” have become anthems to an integrated American youth and popular culture. Berry is a musical icon who established rock and roll as a musical form and brought the worlds of black and white together in song. Born in St. Louis on October 18, 1926 Berry had many influences on his life that shaped his musical style. He emulated the smooth vocal clarity of his idol, Nat King Cole, while playing blues songs from bands like Muddy Waters. For his first stage performance, Berry chose to sing a Jay McShann song called “Confessin’ the Blues.” It was at his high school’s student musical performance, when the blues was well-liked but not considered appropriate for such an event. He got a thunderous applause for his daring choice, and from then on, Berry had to be onstage.

GUITAR LESSONS

Berry took up the guitar after that, inspired by his partner in the school production. He found that if he learned rhythm changes and blues chords, he could play most of the popular songs on the radio at the time. His friend, Ira Harris, showed him techniques on the guitar that would become the foundation of Berry’s original sound. Then in 1952, he began playing guitar and singing in a club band whose song list ranged from blues to ballads to calypso to country. Berry was becoming an accomplished showman, incorporating gestures and facial expressions to go with the lyrics.

It was in 1953 that Chuck Berry joined the Sir John’s Trio (eventually renamed the Chuck Berry Combo), which played the popular Cosmopolitan Club in St. Louis. Country-western music was big at the time, so Berry decided to use some of the riffs and create his own unique hillbilly sound. The black audience thought he was crazy at first, but couldn’t resist trying to dance along with it. Since country was popular with white people, they began to come to the shows, and the audience was at some points almost 40 percent white. Berry’s stage show antics were getting attention, but the other band members did their parts as well. In his own words: “I would slur my strings to make a passage that Johnnie (Johnson) could not produce with piano keys but the answer would be so close that he would get a tremendous ovation. His answer would sound similar to some that Jerry Lee Lewis’s fingers later began to flay.”

SOME GOOD ADVICE

Later in 1955, Berry went on a road trip to Chicago, where he chanced upon a club where his idol, Muddy Waters, was performing. He arrived late and only heard the last song, but when it was over he got the attention of Waters and asked him who to see about making a record. Waters replied, “Yeah, Leonard Chess. Yeah, Chess Records over on Forty-seventh and Cottage.” Berry went there on Monday and discovered it was a blues label where greats like Howlin’ Wolf and Bo Diddley recorded. He didn’t have any tapes to show, but Chess was willing to listen if he brought some back from St. Louis. So Berry went home and recorded some originals, including the would-be “Maybellene,” then called “Ida May,” and drove back to Chicago later that week to audition. Much to Berry’s surprise, it was that hillbilly number that caught Chess’ attention. Berry was signed to Chess Records and in the summer of 1955, “Maybellene” reached #5 on the Pop Charts and #1 on the R&B Charts. Through Chuck Berry, Chess Records moved from the R&B genre into the mainstream and Berry himself was on his way to stardom.

THE REST IS HISTORY

Berry continued his success with such hits as “Brown-Eyed Man,” “Too Much Monkey Business,” “Memphis,” “Roll Over, Beethoven!” and “Johnny B. Goode.” “Johnny B. Goode” is Berry’s masterpiece, as it brought together all the elements of Berry’s unique musical sound. It cemented his place in rock history and led to fame in the 1950s. His popularity garnered him television and movie appearances and he toured frequently.

Berry’s incredible success is due to his ability to articulate the concerns and attitudes of his audience in his music. At the height of his success, Berry was a 30-year-old black man singing to a mostly white, teenage audience. Dubbed the “Eternal Teenager,” Chuck Berry’s knowledge of the pop market made it possible for him to break color barriers and play to an integrated audience.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Berry’s music was the inspiration for such groups as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Berry had a number of comeback recordings and in 1972 had the first and only #1 Pop Chart hit of his career with “My Ding-A-Ling. 1986 fittingly saw him inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as the very first inductee in history. As a tribute to his pervasiveness in the realm of rock, a clip of “Johnny B. Goode” was chosen played in the Voyager I spacecraft, proving Chuck Berry and his rock legacy are truly out of this world.

https://rockhall.com/inductees/chuck-berry

From 1986 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Essay

“Berry’s repertoire is required learning for all serious rockers, and essential listening for anyone who wants to know what rock and roll is all about.”

—Michael Hill

Chuck Berry’s fusion of blues, R&B, and country created an enduring template for rock & roll instrumentation, breaking down boundaries of both genre and race. He vastly expanded the vocabulary of the electric guitar, his technical prowess and showmanship inspiring the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and countless more. Lyrically, Berry’s rhythmic, vivid storytelling elevated the language of rock, enshrining American teenage life in song.

Inducted:
1986

Category:
Performer

Inducted By:
Keith Richards (The Rolling Stones)

Induction
Impact
Influence

Induction (Videos)

"Johnny B. Goode"
"Wang Dang Doodle"
"Roll Over Beethoven"

Influence and Influences

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Charlie Christian

Chuck Berry Influenced

Jimi Hendrix Experience

Bruce Springsteen

Joan Jett & The Blackhearts

BIOGRAPHY

Chuck Berry’s music has transcended generations. He earns respect to this day because he was truly an entertainer. Berry, also known as “The Father of Rock & Roll," gained success by watching the audience’s reaction and playing accordingly, putting his listeners’ amusement above all else. For this reason, tunes like “Johnny B. Goode,” “Maybellene” and “Memphis” have become anthems to an integrated American youth and popular culture. Berry is a musical icon who established rock and roll as a musical form and brought the worlds of black and white together in song. Born in St. Louis on October 18, 1926 Berry had many influences on his life that shaped his musical style. He emulated the smooth vocal clarity of his idol, Nat King Cole, while playing blues songs from bands like Muddy Waters. For his first stage performance, Berry chose to sing a Jay McShann song called “Confessin’ the Blues.” It was at his high school’s student musical performance, when the blues was well-liked but not considered appropriate for such an event. He got a thunderous applause for his daring choice, and from then on, Berry had to be onstage.

FILMS

1995 History of Rock 'n' Roll - Rock 'n' Roll Explodes
1993 History of Rock 'n' Roll - Guitar Heroes
1993 Bluesland: A Portrait in American Music
1987 Chuck Berry: Hail Hail Rock 'n' Roll
1985 Chuck Berry & Bo Diddley's Rock 'n' Roll All-Star Jam
1982 National Lampoon's Class Reunion
1978 American Hot Wax
1973 London Rock and Roll Show of 1973
1973 Let the Good Times Roll
1969 Little Richard: Keep on Rockin'
1969 Chuck Berry: Rock 'n' Roll Music
1965 Chuck Berry Hosts: BORN TO ROCK - The T.A.M.I. - T.N.T. Show
1959 Jazz on a Summer's Day
1959 Go Johnny Go (PAL only)
1957 Mister Rock and Roll
1956 Rock, Rock, Rock
NA Chuck Berry: Live at the Roxy with Tina Turner
NA Joined on Stage By Tina Turner

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

June 9th, 2017 The long awaited final studio album CHUCK, is released to critical acclaim.

August 26, 2014 Chuck honored with the prestigious Polar Music Prize.

December 2, 2000 Honoree at the 23rd Kennedy Center Honors.

September 2, 1995 Performs "Johnny B. Goode" alongside Bruce Springsteen at the Concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

October 8, 1987 The film " Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll" is released. It is a live tribute to Berry, and is directed by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.

1987 Publishes his honest and insightful autobiography.

January 23, 1986 Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York City.

February 26, 1985 Receives Lifetime Achievement Award at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards.

June 1, 1979 Performs for President Jimmy Carter.

March 1, 1978 Appears as himself in the film "American Hot Wax," a biography about deejay Alan Freed.

October 21, 1972 The song "My Ding-a-Ling" (originally "My Tambourine") reaches No. 1, the only Berry recording to top the charts.

May 1, 1972 The London Chuck Berry Sessions is released; it becomes Berry's top-selling album, hitting No. 8 on the charts.

1965 Appears in concert film featuring the TAMI (Teen-Age Music International) Show, along with The Beach Boys, Rolling Stones and more.

May 31, 1961 Opens own amusement park, called Berryland, outside St. Louis.

March 17, 1958 "Sweet Little Sixteen" grabs No. 1 spot on R&B chart and No. 2 on pop chart, while rock & roll classic"Johnny B. Goode" gets No. 2 on R&B and No. 8 on pop.

September-November 1957 Goes on tour with the "Biggest Show of Stars for '57," which also included Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, etc.

June 30, 1956 Berry's song "Roll Over Beethoven" takes the second spot on the R&B chart, and gets to No. 29 on the pop chart.

September 1955 "Maybellene" hits No. 5 on Billboard's Rock and Roll Singles chart.

May 21, 1955 Records first songs, "Maybellene" and "Wee Wee Hours."

May 1955 Takes a roadtrip to Chicago; talks briefly to Muddy Waters, who refers him to Chess Records. There he lands a recording contract.

December 30, 1952 Receives a call from pianist Johnnie Johnson asking Berry to join the Sir John's Trio, a band that played at the very popular Cosmopolitan Club.

June 13, 1952 Joins Tommy Stevens in a house band that played Huff's Garden every Saturday.

1941 Performs at his school's musical stage performance, singing "Confessin' The Blues" while accompanied by his friend, Tommy Stevens, on guitar. Stevens' powerful performance inspires him to learn how to play the instrument himself.

AWARDS

2014 Polar Music Prize

2012 PEN Literary Award Winner

2002 BMI ICON award winner; other winners were Little Richard and Bo Diddley

1987 Receives a star on Hollywood Boulevard in California

1989 Honored with a star on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis, Missouri

1985 Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

1985 Receives Lifetime Achievement Award at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards

1982 Inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Association International Hall of Fame

ACHIEVEMENTS

First singer/songwriter of 1955

First guitarist/singer to get on Billboard charts

Directly inspired great rock icons The Beatles, Beach Boys, Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley

United blacks and whites by producing music that appealed to everyone

His single "Johnny B. Goode" made the top 10 in 1958

Had the number one single in 1972 with "My Ding-a-ling"

Performed for President Jimmy Carter at the White House in 1975

Was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986

Released his autobiography in 1987

"Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll" made its debut in 1987

Berry performed "Johnny B. Goode" with Bruce Springsteen at the Concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995

1977 Johnny Be Goode included content on Voyager 1 spacecraft

GENERAL INFORMATION

Birth Name: Charles Edward Anderson Berry

Nicknames: Father of Rock ‘N’ Roll, The Prime Minister of Rock ‘N’ Roll

Occupation: Musician

Born: October 18, 1926

Birth place: St. Louis, Mo.

Parents: Henry and Martha Berry

Wife: Themetta Suggs-Berry

Children: Darlin Ingrid Berry-Clay, Melody Exes Berry-Eskridge, Aloha Isa Lei Berry, Charles Edward Berry Jr.

Siblings: Henry, Thelma, Lucy, Paul, Martha

Weight: 180 lbs

Musically influenced by: Nat "King" Cole, Muddy Waters

Trademark: Duckwalk
FAVORITES

Food: Enjoyed beef and seafood, peaches, home fries, candied yams, chili, grape soda, orange juice, Snickers bars and Dutch apple pie. Despised liver, okra, gumbo, celery, carrots, cooked onions, grapefruit, salami and liquor.

Hobbies: Playing music, softball, twenty questions, chess, croquet, highway driving

Comedians: Lucille Ball

Music & Publishing Licensing:
aruiz@drivepublishing.com

Business Affairs:
chuckberry@isaleemusic.com

Support and Vote For Angie Nixon to Become the Next Senator from the State Of Florida Because She is An Outstanding Candidate And A Genuine Working Class Progressive Leader And Grass Roots Organizer Who Will Fight the Fascists in the U.S. Government Head On and Openly Represent and Fight For The Real Interests of The Masses Without Sacrifing One's Integrity, Independent Values and AuthenticDemands for Justice And Equality

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:58:03 +0000

Angie Nixon and Maxwell Frost Show ‘Orange’ Trump No Mercy on ICE, Tariffs and Corruption

Hook Global
October 12, 2026

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pkMALyFS5Q

#DonaldTrump #AngieNixon #ICE

Democratic lawmakers Angie Nixon and Maxwell Frost take aim at Donald Trump in a fiery exchange with a student audience. From ICE raids and controversial tariffs to corruption allegations, the two politicians deliver sharp criticism of the president’s policies. Their remarks spark reactions from the crowd, offering a glimpse into how younger Americans are engaging with the political battles shaping the country’s future.

#AngieNixon #MaxwellFrost #DonaldTrump #ICE

00:00 Angie Nixon and Maxwell Frost Take Questions From FIU Students
01:16 Nixon Blasts Trump’s Tariffs and Tax Bill
03:02 Nixon and Frost Defend Students’ First Amendment Rights
04:27 Frost Warns of Attacks on Student Protesters 05:58 Why Young Voters Matter in the Midterms
08:24 Nixon Urges Students to Vote: “Politics Is Doing Y’all”
10:24 Nixon Calls to Abolish ICE
11:40 FIU Student Asks How to Fight Islamophobia 15:15 Nixon Urges Democrats to Get Louder Against MAGA
16:56 Nixon on Fighting Corporate Power and Billionaire Influence
22:09 Frost Reveals Elon Musk’s $20 Million Threat 23:11 Nixon Outlines Plan to Raise Teachers’ Pay 27:32 Nixon Blasts For-Profit Schools and Corporate Greed
29:05 Nixon Challenges Gen Z to Shape America’s Future
31:27 Nixon Appeals to Latino Voters in Florida
38:41 FIU Student Questions Florida’s Environmental Crisis
39:39 Nixon Demands Accountability for Corporate Polluters
41:57 Nixon and Frost Discuss Pathways to Citizenship
46:15 Frost Calls ICE Part of a White Supremacist Project
48:24 Frost Says Republicans Benefit From a Broken Immigration System
49:47 Frost Argues ICE Must Be Abolished
52:29 Nixon Addresses Jewish Voters and Her Position on Israel
55:33 Nixon Vows to Defend DEI and Inclusive Education
57:10 Nixon Calls for Restoring Federal DEI Funding 1:02:04 Maxwell Frost Urges Students to Organize Beyond Election Day
1:03:21 Frost Warns of Barriers to Youth Voting 1:04:46 Students Applaud Nixon and Frost -

For more videos, subscribe to our channel: / hookglobal

Visit our website for more news:
https://hooknews.com

'...Then Call Me a Radical’: Angie Nixon Blasts Her Opponent at Fiery Rally with Bernie Sanders

Hook Global

VIDEO:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycmw6mBR2Bs

October 18, 2026

#AngieNixon #BernieSanders #AshleyMoody

Bernie Sanders joins Florida Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon at a campaign rally as she attacks Ashley Moody over corruption, rising living costs, healthcare cuts, and stock trading. Nixon outlines her support for Medicare for All, workers’ rights, Social Security, and higher wages, while criticizing spending on endless wars and calling on working people to challenge billionaire influence in politics.

#AngieNixon #BernieSanders #AshleyMoody #FloridaPolitics #MedicareForAll

Chapters of speech:

0:00 Angie Nixon Calls for an End to Corruption
0:54 Bernie Sanders and the Fight for Working People 2:16 Nixon's Background and Political Mission
4:34 Workers' Rights, Healthcare and Public Education 6:13 Florida's Cost-of-Living Crisis
7:02 Attacking Ashley Moody's Record
8:52 The Hope Florida Controversy
10:17 Living Wages and Workers' Rights
11:50 Medicare for All and Healthcare Costs
13:12 Protecting Social Security
14:03 Endless Wars and Domestic Spending
15:36 "If That's Radical, Call Me a Radical"
18:07 Unity, Decency and the American Dream
20:05 "We Are the Heroes We've Been Waiting For" 21:04 Get Out the Vote
22:50 Taking on Billionaires and Big Money
23:54 Nixon Takes Aim at JD Vance and Trump
24:35 "When We Fight, We Win"

For more videos, subscribe to our channel:
/ hookglobal

Visit our website for more news:
https://hooknews.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angie_Nixon

Angie Nixon (b. February 27, 1984) is an American politician and businesswoman who has served as a member of the Florida House of Representatives since 2020. A member of the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, she is the Democratic nominee in the 2026 United States Senate special election in Florida.

2026 U.S. Senate campaign

On January 22, 2026, Nixon launched her campaign for the Democratic Party nomination in the 2026 United States Senate special election in Florida.[17] She joined the Democratic Socialists of America and Working Families Party in 2026.[18] Her campaign pledges included universal health care,[b] higher taxes on the wealthy and a minimum wage of $25 per hour.[6] She defeated Alex Vindman in the primary in what was seen as a significant upset.[20][21] Nixon has been noted in national press along with US Senate candidates Juliana Stratton, Marquita Bradshaw, and Catherine Fleming Bruce, and gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms as notable Black women who are running in the 2026 general election.[22][23][24] Nixon set the record for first senate candidate nominated by a major party for United States Senate who is a member of the DSA.[18]

Book store

In 2024, Nixon founded a bookstore and coffee shop in Jacksonville's Northside called Cafe Resistance, which serves as a community-focused space for local organizing, after-school educational and recreational activities for children and students, and promoting Black history and culture through literature and storytelling, in opposition to state repression of historical accounts of African-American resistance.[28]

Florida Public Service Union

Nixon is currently Director for the Florida Public Service Union's (FPSU) Higher Education Campaign[29] and was previously the Florida state field director for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), of which FPSU is an affiliate.[30][31]

Since 2022, she has also been the executive director of Florida For All, a coalition of six different organizations, including SEIU, that works to promote voter rights and enfran
In June of 2026, Nixon joined the DSA. When asked about this by WLRN (Miami public television), Nixon replied, "I don’t fully align with anybody’s full platform 100%, not even the Democratic Party."[35] Interviewed by WMNF, she also said of the DSA, "the reason I joined the organization was because they believe we should have access to quality healthcare. They believe that we should have quality access to quality housing and fully funded public schools."[36]

Nixon has called to raise the federal minimum wage.[37]

Foreign policy

Nixon is opposed to the 2026 Iran war.[38][39] She criticized the war's cost, and said it was "jeopardizing the lives of American service members and Iranian civilians."[39]

Nixon said in August 2026 that she would have voted to cut $3.3 billion in aid to Israel.[39] She said, "We cannot continue to send money to countries that are violating international law, that are violating human rights."[39]

Healthcare

On the topic of healthcare policy, Nixon's long-term plan proposes Medicare for All, a type of universal health care.[40][41] Her short-term plan is to reintroduce the enhanced tax credit under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).[40][41] She said, "If we reestablish the funding that was cut, we can demand that these insurance companies drive down their premium costs because it impacted not just the ACA marketplace; it impacted private insurers, too."[40]

Immigration

Nixon said she supports border security as well as "clear and compassionate pathways for citizenship."[39] Her 2026 campaign platform calls for abolishing ICE and rebuilding immigration enforcement.[39]

Data centers

Nixon's stance on data centers is that a federal moratorium should be imposed on new data center construction until guardrails are established to protect communities and the environment.[42][43]

One Big Beautiful Bill Act

Nixon said she would vote to repeal the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). She said, "It gave those tax breaks to those billionaires and to the ultra-rich, and we need to make sure they pay what they owe to help us with our Medicare for All."[38][44] She has criticized OBBBA's impact on Medicaid, housing, and hospital programs.[44][37]In June of 2026, Nixon joined the DSA. When asked about this by WLRN (Miami public television), Nixon replied, "I don’t fully align with anybody’s full platform 100%, not even the Democratic Party."[35] Interviewed by WMNF, she also said of the DSA, "the reason I joined the organization was because they believe we should have access to quality healthcare. They believe that we should have quality access to quality housing and fully funded public schools."[36]

Nixon has called to raise the federal minimum wage.[37]

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: ICE Must Be Abolished! Here Are Foremost Among The Many Reasons Why

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 14:22:03 +0000

VIDEO: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani Denounces ICE and the ongoing domestic terrorism that it continues to spread throughout the country:

https://youtube.com/shorts/5BYha9RnYFw?si=AAgApJiOsxE_AcA4

https://truthout.org/articles/ice-is-fast-tracking-a-nationwide-domestic-spy-program-across-dozens-of-cities/

News
Immigration

ICE Is Fast-Tracking a Nationwide Domestic Spy Program Across Dozens of Cities

The agency plans to contract with around 142 agents to take part in domestic spying operations.

by Chris Walker
October 15, 2026
Truthout

Federal agents walk near the scene where a man was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer during an operation in the Bronx borough of New York on October 8, 2026.CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP via Getty Images

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is reportedly fast-tracking a program designed to expand its domestic surveillance capabilities in dozens of cities across the United States.

Details of the new spy program, entitled the Enforcement and Removal Operations Overwatch and National Security Enforcement, or ERO ONE, were published on a federal website in September. The American Prospect reported on ERO ONE earlier this week.

Around $100 million is expected to be allocated from the Department of Homeland Security to the program, which intends to contract 142 intelligence agents who will be placed in at least two dozen cities throughout the country. Those agents would coordinate with nearby ICE offices, as well as with a central hub located in Washington, D.C.

The published plan doesn’t specify what these agents will do while in the field, but it does indicate that they will analyze classified and nonclassified information to create “network, link, and relationship” analyses. Such research examines not only a specific person, but also their connections — including members of their household, extended family members, friends, and even acquaintances.

The government’s explainer of the program states that agents will “provide research, analysis, evaluation, reporting, coordination, and related intelligence support to ERO ONE headquarters and designated field locations.”

Related Story

News

Immigration
Rep. Delia Ramirez Introduces Landmark Bill to Abolish DHS, ICE, and CBP

The Department of Homeland Security was established in 2002 as part of the Bush administration’s “war on terror.”

by Sharon Zhang
October 13, 2026
Truthout

The document places some restrictions on ERO ONE agents, who will not be allowed to engage in actions such as “arrest, detention, search, seizure, interrogation, inspection, investigative, or other law enforcement authorities.” However, given that ICE agents have repeatedly overreached their own enforcement powers or blatantly lied to residents during enforcement operations, it’s not unreasonable to believe these restrictions could be ignored.

ICE has already expanded its domestic spying capabilities through facial recognition and mobile phone location data software, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) technologies as part of its mass deportation efforts. ICE has also used “zero-click” technology that allows the agency to access encrypted data on an individual’s phone by sending a link to the user that doesn’t require them to click it at all.

Critics warn the new program is not only set to target immigrants in the country, but could be the precipice of a new domestic surveillance paradigm.

“It looks dangerously like the construction of an internal spying agency,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, explained to The American Prospect. “It’s a nightmare in the making.”

https://zeteo.com/p/this-week-in-democracy-week-90-ice

This Week in Democracy

This Week in Democracy – Week 90: ICE Agent Posing as Construction Worker Shoots Man in New York

Zeteo’s weekly round-up, documenting the growth of authoritarianism in Trump’s second term.

Team Zeteo

October 9, 2026

People protest where a man was allegedly shot by an ICE officer on Oct. 8, 2026, in New York City. Photo by Ryan Murphy/Getty Images

The countdown is officially underway. We’re now just 25 days away from the U.S. midterm elections, which will be a test for a democracy that has been undermined, battered, and beaten since Donald Trump retook the White House less than two years ago.

This week in democracy saw revelations of more possible corruption, another ICE shooting, and racism at its purest form. Here’s just a taste of how Trump and his cronies harmed democracy, undermined the Constitution, and hurt Americans and societies worldwide over the last seven days:

Saturday, Oct. 3 – Talks to End War in Ukraine Include Oil Deal Tied to Trump Envoys

The New York Times reported that a multibillion-dollar oil deal has been discussed as part of the Trump administration’s negotiations with Russia to end its war in Ukraine.

The deal, which would cover oil fields, refineries, and gas stations owned by one of Russia’s biggest energy companies, is being sought by an arm of the U.S. government, a U.S. investor who donated $2 million to Trump-related causes, and two Middle Eastern investor groups with ties to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – the two main U.S. negotiators to end the war in Ukraine.

Sunday, Oct. 4 – On Her Last Day at DHS, Kristi Noem Secured Deal With Political Donor

The Times also reported that on Kristi Noem’s last day as Homeland Security secretary, the agency signed a multi-million-dollar agreement to buy five airplanes from a company whose owner had been one of Noem’s political donors. In a statement, Noem said “the purchase of these planes was not completed” during her tenure, but didn’t answer specific questions about the agreement.

The agreement, which saw the planes purchased at a substantial markup, came after the company’s chairman, William Walters, donated $10,000 to Noem’s PAC in 2024. During her time as Homeland Security secretary, the agency gave more than $900 million in contracts to companies led by Walters.
Monday, Oct. 5 – Trump Says He’ll Pay for Ads Himself, But Won’t Commit To Reimbursing Taxpayers

On Truth Social, Trump said he would pay for his campaign-style TV ads himself, “and with money I raised for MAGA, INC,” a pro-Trump super PAC.

Democrats, legal experts, and even some Trump officials have labeled the ads illegal, with some saying they could be an impeachable offense.

A day after Trump’s post, the White House said the super PAC isn’t planning to reimburse taxpayers for over $10 million the government had already spent on the ads, and Trump himself refused to commit to pay back the funds himself.
Tuesday, Oct. 6 – Whistleblower Reveals Trump Wanted Protesters Investigated By FBI

NBC News reported that the Trump administration ordered the FBI to investigate protesters engaging in anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles last year, according to a whistleblower report from a former agency employee.

The complaint alleged that the investigations violated protesters' First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceful assembly and also went against FBI policy. While the whistleblower said there wasn’t sufficient evidence to justify the probe, she was told by a colleague that “the president wants this investigation.”

Senator Alex Padilla@SenAlexPadilla

BREAKING: My office received a whistleblower disclosure revealing Trump allegedly ordered the FBI to investigate and arrest protesters in Los Angeles who were criticizing the Administration’s mass deportation agenda.

Wednesday, Oct. 7 – ICE Reviewed Voter Records, Targeted Nonprofits

Democracy Docket reported that ICE obtained the voting records of tens of millions of U.S. citizens. The agency also investigated hundreds of nonprofit organizations across the country last year that help people register to vote, and considered deploying undercover agents as part of its probe.

The effort targeted nonprofits in Ohio, New Jersey, D.C., Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, including the latter’s state branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations – the country’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.
Thursday, Oct. 8 – ICE Shoots Man in New York

In New York City, an ICE agent posing as a construction worker shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck after firing seven rounds into his vehicle, while a 5-year-old was in the backseat. Wired later reported that the agent who shot Belgal has repeatedly been accused of unlawful arrests and excessive force, including tackling a pregnant woman to the ground, during arrests in New York and Minneapolis.

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@NYCMayor

This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds. We believe the child was physically unharmed.

Meanwhile, Trump went on his latest racist tirade on Truth Social, disgustingly claiming that Somali immigrants have “taken over” Minnesota and urging residents to “fight back.” (Read more about Trump’s efforts to start a race war to win the midterms in Zeteo’s ‘First Draft.’)

Friday, Oct. 9 – Trump Renews Push to Fire Lisa Cook

Trump signed a presidential memo establishing a panel to investigate Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud she has steadfastly denied. The panel will ultimately report to Trump on whether there is “cause” for her removal.

The latest push to fire Cook follows a Supreme Court ruling in June allowing her to continue in her position. The ruling, however, didn’t prevent Trump from attempting to remove Cook from her post again.

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Did you miss previous weeks of ‘This Week in Democracy’? Catch up here.

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: On By And About the legendary and innovative writer, artist, and critic Ishmael Reed and his extraordinary life, art, and legacy alongside various reviews, critiques, analyses, encomiums, and celebrations by Kofi Natambu

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:35:28 +0000

https://lithub.com/reinventing-the-slave-narrative-ishmael-reed-on-flight-to-canada-at-50/

ISHMAEL REED (b. February 22, 1938)

Reinventing the Slave Narrative: Ishmael Reed on Flight to Canada at 50

“Traditionally, mainstream critics have viewed Black writers as apprentices of white masters.”

by Ishmael Reed

August 17, 2026
Literary Hub

I was fourteen when my interest in history began. I placed third in Buffalo’s citywide Richmond Speaking Contest. All three of us winners received certificates for book purchases, and I bought a picture book about Stalin’s regime. I became so captivated by this book that when Stalin died, I tuned in to the funeral even though it was 3 AM EST.

When I was a student, we were taught European history. In our textbooks Blacks appeared happy with their condition under slavery. I recall illustrations of Blacks dancing to the fiddle. In these books, Africa was inhabited by ferocious animals and barely human men and women.

A friend of mine, the brightest kid in the projects, who by his early teens was reading William Faulkner, showed the extent of our indoctrination. He would repeat what we’d been taught by our schoolbooks and by films like Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation. He said the Klan was justified in its actions because the Blacks elected during Reconstruction were incompetent. Even Shelby Foote, the heavily featured historian in Ken Burns’s The Civil War, was a defender of the Klan. He compared them to the French Resistance.

I was in my twenties when I read W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, which proposed that Black legislators passed progressive legislation during Reconstruction and that it was a general strike among the slaves that ended slavery. This theory seems to square with the testimonies of white diarists like Mary Boykin Chesnut. Planters complained about work slowdowns or Blacks not working at all, or joining the Union as contraband.

Then as now, such information was unavailable to students in the lower grades as a perennial white supremacist curriculum denies such victories to the enslaved. When I saw Gone with the Wind, I rooted for the O’Haras. Having sided with the oppressors, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Cherokee scholar Geary Hobson took the side of the cowboys against the Indians. Hollywood’s leading men played Confederate killers like Jesse and Frank James who murdered citizens in Lawrence, Kansas. Their crime? “Stealing Negroes.” So entrancing is Hollywood, with its pro-Confederate films like Shane, that you find yourself supporting the Confederacy.

I was intellectually curious as a youngster and wanted to know which contributions Blacks had made to civilization besides those in sports and entertainment. This information was hard to come by. I couldn’t find the answers in textbooks or popular culture. I purchased Joel Augustus Rogers’s 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro with Complete Proof. Rogers was a Jamaica-born journalist. I took the book to school. The teacher held it at arm’s length as though it were a dead cat. She dismissed the claims made by Rogers. He challenged what we were taught in school, where George Washington was depicted as a god, which is how he is shown in Constantino Brumidi’s painting “Apotheosis of Washington” in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol. Rogers claimed George Washington sent an enslaved Negro to Barbados to be exchanged for a hogshead of molasses, a cask of rum, and “other good spirits.” Rogers was right about that and other facts. I didn’t have the intellectual footing to challenge my teachers then, some of whom were as ignorant of points of view rejected by the official establishment of historians as we were.

Traditionally, mainstream critics have viewed Black writers as apprentices of white masters, without a tradition of their own….Our generation rejected these influences.

With more female, Hispanic, Native American, Asian American, and Black historians entering the field, the situation is changing, yet these new historians face fierce resistance from politicians and best-selling historians as they introduce different points of view about the nation’s history. An example of how the Good Old Boy historians who praise sadists like Robert E. Lee are undergoing scrutiny can be found in a review of the late David McCullough’s The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, in which Joyce E. Chaplin disputed his claims. She writes, “McCullough plays down the violence that displaced the Indians, including the actual Ohio people. He adopts settlers’ prejudiced language about ‘savages’ and ‘wilderness,’ words that denied Indians’ humanity and active use of their land.” In my play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, which challenged the musical Hamilton’s depiction of slave owner Alexander Hamilton as an “ardent abolitionist,” I merely staged the research conducted by four women historians.

Blacks were taught to revere such exterminators of Native Americans and slaveholders like Hamilton, who applauded a murderous vigilante raid on a Native American settlement as a victory over “savages.” Our teachers told us that we had no culture or traditions. When in high school we were asked to choose a country to represent for United Nations Day, none of the Black students chose an African nation. Our image of Africa was formed by popular culture. In their cartoons, even sophisticated magazines represented Africans as cannibals. Shockingly, so did Zora Neale Hurston.

I could have learned about Black history had I asked questions when working for publisher A. J. Smitherman. He was the first to publish my writing in his newspaper, The Empire Star. I was sixteen at the time, and my writing coach was Empire Star columnist Mary Cosby, an important figure in Black history, who died at the age of one hundred, and Toussaint Smitherman, who, in his middle age, was probably suffering from nightmares about a Tulsa mob entering his family’s house and looting their belongings during the race massacre of 1921.

I later learned that his family hid in the basement. Jealous of Smitherman’s prosperity, the mob burned down the house and Smitherman’s publishing company. Later, as Smitherman struggled to keep his weekly newspaper in Buffalo above water, there were hints of a past prosperity. The backyard was a dumping ground for paper and other debris. Among the waste paper, I found photographs of a younger Smitherman squatting before a truck that read The Tulsa Star. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of this and other photos. I spent long hours in the presence of Smitherman, who sometimes would fall asleep at the wheel when returning the newspapers from a suburban printing plant to his dingy office located on Broadway near St. Mary’s Church in Buffalo.

While living in New York, where I resided beginning in 1962, I learned that Smitherman was the hero of the 1921 Tulsa uprising against lynching. In his newspaper, The Tulsa Star, he fought editorially against the mob violence that victimized unarmed Blacks. Before that, he edited The Muskogee Star, founded in Muskogee, Oklahoma, which crusaded against whites receiving oil rights that belonged to Blacks and Native Americans. He didn’t talk about his past when I knew him in Buffalo, because the Oklahoma authorities were in pursuit. His newspaper’s editorials against lynching were seen as “inciting a riot,” a reference to the deaths of three hundred Blacks murdered in the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. He and his family fled to Boston, which refused to extradite him to Oklahoma, and later they settled in Buffalo. I was proud when, many years later, in a speech commemorating the centennial of the Tulsa insurgency delivered on June 1, 2021, President Joe Biden cited Smitherman’s poem about the resistance of Black men against the would-be lynchers. Smitherman’s indictment had been dismissed in 2007, and he was posthumously inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame.

Though Smitherman published The Empire Star until his death, at one point, after I had worked there for about two years, he was unable to pay me, and so I quit. Shortly afterward, in 1955, the Black Michigan Avenue YMCA chose me as a delegate to attend an international YMCA convention in Paris. I was seventeen years old. There I met African students who were quite different from the image of Africa in our textbooks and the popular media. When I returned to Buffalo, I dropped out of high school. If they were lying about Africa, what else might they be lying about?

Later, after I dropped out of college, I returned to The Empire Star, by which time A. J. Smitherman had died and been succeeded by Joe Walker, who now served as editor. Joe was twenty-seven at the time. I was twenty-two and living in the projects with my first wife and our daughter, Timothy, who would write three novels before she died at sixty. I had missed out on getting an education from Smitherman, Cosby, and Toussaint Smitherman, whose namesake I was ignorant of. We were told that our route to success was to inculcate Anglo mainstream values.

Then, in 1962, I met Malcolm X, one of two geniuses I’ve encountered in my life. He had been an inmate in a prison where thousands of books were available, donated by a philanthropist. He must have read all of them. As part of our job as writers for The Empire Star, Joe Walker and I had a radio show on WUFO that I named the Buffalo Community Round Table. Our guest was Malcolm X, who was beginning to be noticed by the press. The program host on WUFO was Jimmy Lyons, a Black man who had overcome the barrier that prevented Black radio talent from displaying their talents.

Like the punk who confronted Gregory Peck’s Jimmy Ringo in The Gunfighter, I said, “Of course, Mr. X would describe Black history as one that’s been distorted.” He said, “It’s cotton patch history.” I didn’t know what he meant at the time. Later, I learned that Malcolm X was referring to a history hidden from us: the long years of Black resistance and revolts. Malcolm X hired Empire Star editor Joe Walker to edit Muhammad Speaks, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam.

I would later learn more about our real history—not the “cotton patch history”—in New York, where Irish American writer David Sharpe believed I should relocate if I wanted to become a writer. Sharpe believed that I had talent. Under Sharpe’s prodding, I went to New York City for a weekend, where we visited Chumley’s, a writers’ bar on Bedford Street in Greenwich Village.

There I met a patron, a screenwriter, who looked at a play I wrote titled “Ethan Booker,” about a clash between Muslims and Christians at a historically Black college. The screenwriter said it showed talent, and for a moment I saw my way into the city for good. Then the play was lost when the car that art critic Bart Farmer was driving to New York broke down. Bart abandoned the vehicle, along with my belongings, which included the play. I thought that the car only needed repairs, but for some reason it was never recovered. My second attempt to get to New York City was successful. Because a mentor, John Black, was an organizer for the 1199 Hospital Workers Union, I got a job at Mount Sinai Hospital.

A patient at Mount Sinai, George B. David, who was a cousin of Adolph Ochs, founder of The New York Times, invited me to work as his assistant in his home. Both David and I were Chattanoogans. He had a theater there called Dreamland. He paid more than what I was receiving from the hospital, but the job came to an end when his family decided that this was an extravagant sum and fired me. He gave me a glowing letter of recommendation to The Times’s personnel office. Using a nasty, sarcastic tone, the personnel director dismissed the letter and ridiculed George David. (Ten years later, my picture would make the front page of The New York Times Book Review.)

In New York during the 1960s, I had come under the influence of Black cultural nationalists like Askia Touré. Through the Umbra Workshop, I became better acquainted with Black history and culture. I also had contact with Black painters like Joe Overstreet, Algernon Miller, Gerald Jackson, Al Loving, Danny Johnson, Peter Bradley, Jack Whitten, Ellsworth Ausby, and white artists like Art Bevacqua and Walter Bowart. Walter and I founded The East Village Other, an underground newspaper which I named. I’d run into musicians like Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and Albert Ayler, a house guest. Jackie McLean admired a poem I dedicated to him. Max Roach called me “The Charlie Parker of American Fiction.” Tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan attended my poetry readings.

I joined the Umbra Workshop in 1963. Amiri Baraka said that the Black Arts Movement originated in the Umbra Workshop. We were from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Buffalo, Harlem, and New Orleans. We were in revolt against the Black imitators who preceded us. Traditionally, mainstream critics have viewed Black writers as apprentices of white masters, without a tradition of their own. They would proudly announce their influences from Faulkner, Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and Henry James. Our generation rejected these influences. Larry Neal spoke for us in his manifesto titled “And Shine Swam On,” printed in Black Fire, an anthology edited by Neal and Amiri Baraka. “And Shine Swam On” is about a “toast” of unknown authorship, which arose from the grassroots and went through many versions. In 2025, I staged my version, The Shine Challenge, 2025, which ran at the Theater for the New City in New York. I expanded the thirty-three or so lines written by Langston Hughes into a two-act play.

When I arrived in New York, I found, besides the Umbra Workshop, poets, painters, and musicians advancing a culture that had been dismissed as vulgar by advocates of High Culture. (I remember sitting next to Dwight Macdonald at a reception hosted by the National Institute of Arts and Letters as he dismissed Miles Davis’s music.) I had written some absurdist pieces in Buffalo, including a short story called “Popcorn,” which I sent to my University of Buffalo professor, Myles Slatin, one of my allies when I was a student there. He never responded to it, and I hadn’t made a copy.

The reviewers might have been thrown off because my influences were not those white masters with whom they were familiar, but Black folklore.

But in New York, I found kindred spirits. Those comic books we traded when we were youngsters were now the subjects of painters whose works are exhibited in museums. East Village Other artists like Spain Rodriguez and Robert Crumb used cartoons to make trenchant social commentary. A long way from the Sunday funnies.

References to popular culture could be found in the works of New York poets, as when Frank O’Hara memorialized Lana Turner (“Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” in Lunch Poems). Writers felt challenged by musicians like Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, and dancers such as Carla Blank and Meredith Monk, who were leaders of a second generation of Greenwich Village’s Judson Church avant-garde, and painters like Joe Overstreet. Realism was definitely out.

Inspired by these trends, I decided to write a series of novels that would parody traditional pop genres, such as the Gothic novel in The Free Lance Pallbearers; the Western in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (a parody of “Yellow Backs,” the name of dime novels in which dudes from the East exaggerate the antics of cowboys); and Flight to Canada, my fifth novel, which was published in 1976.

Flight to Canada was a commercial failure, which led to Random House’s decision not to publish any more of my novels. My friend Toni Morrison, an editor at Random House, killed an ad campaign that would have promoted my fourth novel, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, in which I parodied the crime novel, even though it was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection and won the prestigious Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She hated Louisiana Red and shouted angrily at me about the book as I was exiting Random House one day. I had great affection for Toni, and we were friends until her death, but she just didn’t think that experimental literature was salable. Even Toni came under pressure from the sales department. And though she was classified by some white feminists as an “experimental writer,” she owes more to modernism.

Leaving Random House, I lost my editor, the legendary Anne Freedgood, who had championed my experimental novels. All the editors were under pressure from the sales department to acquire only books that could earn out their advances. St. Martin’s Press was the next stop, where I continued my genre-busting in The Terrible Twos (1982) by combining the Christmas novel with the Washington, D.C. novel. (Terrible Twos became the first of a series that has been a forty-year project and continues with The Terrible Fives, scheduled for publication in November 2026 by Baraka Books in Montreal.) I also published Reckless Eyeballing, my sixth novel, which skewered some of the hypocrisy and double standards of the Gloria Steinem and womanist factions of the feminist movement, which, according to Harriet Fraad, writing in Tikkun, co-opted a movement that began as working-class and racially integrated. The late editor Joyce Engelson said that Reckless Eyeballing would offend everybody. Still, she stood by the novel, and both Toni Morrison and playwright Adrienne Kennedy attended a book party hosted by my agent Barbara Lowenstein. Although white feminists led by Emily Toth planned a boycott of the book at Louisiana State University, it failed because none of the boycott planners had actually read the book, but were reacting to a hatchet job by The New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani.

The reviewers might have been thrown off because my influences were not those white masters with whom they were familiar, but Black folklore. The characters in Reckless Eyeballing are based on those found in African animal tales. Ian Ball is a perfect match for Br’er Rabbit. The main influencers of Flight to Canada were also Black: Henry Bibb, who was born a slave to a Kentucky state senator and fought for years until he eventually won his freedom in 1841, and William Wells Brown, an abolitionist and writer who had been born into slavery but escaped to the North in 1834. Henry Louis Gates Jr. gives me credit for reviving Brown’s reputation. My parody of Bibb’s letter to his “owner” William Gatewood was the origin of Flight to Canada. The following selection of Bibb’s letter is an excerpt from Voices of a People’s History of the United States, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove.

Henry Bibb’s Letter to William Gatewood
March 23, 1844

Dear Sir:—I am happy to inform you that you are not mistaken in the man whom you sold as property, and received pay for as such. But I thank God that I am not property now, but am regarded as a man like yourself, and although I live far north, I am enjoying a comfortable living by my own industry. If you should ever chance to be traveling this way, and will call on me, I will use you better than you did me while you held me as a slave. Think not that I have any malice against you, for the cruel treatment which you inflicted on me while I was in your power. As it was the custom of your country, to treat your fellow men as you did me and my little family, I can freely forgive you.

I wish to be remembered in love to my aged mother, and friends; please tell her that if we should never meet again in this life, my prayer shall be to God that we may meet in Heaven, where parting shall be no more.

You wish to be remembered to King and Jack. I am pleased, sir, to inform you that they are both here, well, and doing well. They are both living in Canada West. They are now the owners of better farms than the men who once owned them.

You may perhaps think hard of us for running away from slavery, but as to myself, I have but one apology to make for it, which is this; I have only to regret that I did not scare at an earlier period. I might have been free long before I was. I think it is very probable that I should have been a toiling slave on your property today if you had treated me differently.

To be compelled to stand by and see you whip and slash my wife without mercy, when I could afford her no protection, not even by offering myself to suffer the lash in her place, was more than I felt it to be the duty of a slave husband to endure, while the way was open to Canada. My infant child was also frequently flogged by Mrs. [William] Gatewood, for crying, until its skin was bruised literally purple. This kind of treatment was what drove me from home and family to seek a better home for them. But I am willing to forget the past. I should be pleased to hear from you again, on the reception of this and should also be very happy to correspond with you often, if it should be agreeable to yourself. I subscribe myself a friend to the oppressed, and Liberty forever.

Like conceptual artist David Hammons providing a statue with an overcoat, to begin Flight to Canada I applied a new coating on Bibb’s letter in the form of an epistolary poem. Using contemporary hip language instead of requesting reconciliation as the historical Bibb did, my character, Robin Quickskill, is not willing to forget the past. He seeks revenge. The recipient of my speaker’s letter is deceased because Robin has not only fooled the master but has poisoned him by mixing his Old Crow whiskey with rat poison. (Precisionist John A. Williams said I should have used strychnine.) Typical of the literary style of fugitives like Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, there was an emphasis on eloquence in an effort to draw sympathizers from a literate white audience. (This was still the practice of some Black writers before the Black Arts revolt in the 1960s, when a younger generation followed the advice of Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, and Larry Neal to find inspiration in folklore.)

I was also influenced by the kind of psychological theories that influenced fiction and Broadway and by critics like Leslie Fiedler during the 1950s. I sought to probe the underbelly of the polished veneer of the Victorian prose of Douglass and others. Did Robert E. Lee experience sexual pleasure when whipping two Black fugitives? Why did he instruct the overseer to apply brine to their wounds after whipping a man and his sister? Why did he order that they be stripped? Was Robert E. Lee a sadist? What are we to make of his remark that slaves needed “Painful discipline” in light of modern ways of examining the desires of humans? “Whips and chains are ornaments of subjection: political, physical, social, and psychological. They remain sexually charged objects today. Bondage has not only shed its taboo status as a sexual bent but has generated a thriving subculture of modern sexuality. The persistent attraction of these artifacts of slavery for authors of pornography is undeniable. The paddle, the whip, the collar, the handcuffs and ankle cuffs, reflect a preoccupation with dominance and submission that has chosen to embody the metaphor of master and slave. Today’s ‘equipment’ of sexual domination derives in part from America’s legacy of slavery.”

My stand-in for the Southern master race was Arthur Swille, who likes being whipped and who practices incest with his deceased sister. In Flight to Canada, I speculate that some of those who sympathized with the Southern cause did so because they were masochists or sadists. Lord Gladstone, who appears in Flight to Canada as a Confederate sympathizer, was a flagellant, which made the news after I wrote the book. Though some of the sexual perversions practiced by some of the characters were considered edgy, I learned later that I’d understated the treatment of Black women during this period. Southern white men forced Black women to undergo painful surgery to increase their own sexual pleasure. Surgeon J. Marion Sims was an American Dr. Mengele who perfected a technique to repair fistulas, which are holes between the vagina and the bladder or rectum and can lead to incontinence, by repeatedly conducting painful experimental surgeries on enslaved Black women without using anesthesia, with which he supplied white women.

Besides Henry Bibb, who inspired the poem which led to the novel, I was influenced by William Wells Brown’s play The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, which was self-published by the author in 1858. Though William Wells Brown lived in Buffalo for nine years, I never heard any Black or white person mention his name while I lived there. No one mentioned that William Wells Brown was an antislavery lecturer. His employer was the American Anti-Slavery Society. We were not aware that poet James Monroe Whitfield, author of America and Other Poems, was also a resident. I and other Black students were ignorant of the National Negro Convention Movement (1830-1864), aka the Colored Conventions Movement, which had met in Buffalo in 1843. Indeed, I didn’t learn that Buffalo had been an antislavery center until after I moved away.

Because he was self-published, William Wells Brown was not under pressure to tone down his indictment against a heinous institution. His pen plays target practice against a situation which he found abhorrent but not without comedy in the form of Cato, a cynical enforcer working for Dr. Gaines, whom Cato despises. Dr. Gaines offers Melinda, a biracial slave, her freedom if she promises to be his kept sex slave. He has told his wife that he has sold Melinda, but in fact he’s hidden her in a cottage. Melinda resists Gaines:

“Sir, let me warn you that if you compass my ruin, a woman’s bitterest curse will be laid upon your head, with all the crushing, withering weight that my soul can impart to it; a curse that shall cling to you throughout the remainder of your wretched life; a curse that shall haunt you like a spectre in your dreams by night, and attend upon you by day; a curse, too, that shall embody itself in the ghastly form of the woman whose chastity you will have outraged.”

Gaines orders the overseer Scragg to punish Glen, Melinda’s husband. He and Moe, a white slave, resent “uppity” Blacks. His speech mirrors that of Huckleberry Finn’s father, Pap Finn, in Mark Twain’s novel. Scragg says,

“I tell you, doctor, that suits me to a charm. I’ve long wanted to whip that nigger. When your brother-in-law came here to board, and brought that boy with him, I felt bad to see a nigger dressed up in such fine clothes, and I wanted to whip him right off. I tell you, doctor, I had rather whip that nigger than go to heaven, any day,—that I had!”

Unlike Henry Bibb’s letter offering to forgive his former master, both Melinda and Glen fight back physically against their oppressors, Scragg and Mrs. Gaines. Glen and Melinda escape Dr. Gaines and make it to Canada. Along the way, with an acerbic wit, Brown mows down what he refers to as the South’s immorality. Mr. Wildmarsh, neighbor to Dr. Gaines, is having sex with his biracial daughter. Mr. Walker, with whom he is having a conversation, indicates such sexual arrangements between slave owners and their biracial daughters was common. Enslavers saw slaves as no different from livestock. Booker T. Washington said that for his white father there was no difference between his mother and a cow.

Flight to Canada also proposes that feudalism, which Europe had left back in the Middle Ages, had found a home in the South. Indeed D. W. Griffith described members of the slaveholding elite as knights and ladies. (I had drawn a collage for the cover of Flight to Canada that showed the enslaved picking cotton with a castle situated on a hill in the background, but the cover was rejected.) Mark Twain blames Sir Walter Scott for providing members of the Scots-Irish South with delusions of nobility. It was Sir Walter Scott who provided the Ku Klux Klan with a mythology. The Klan was also inspired by Goethe’s “Götz von Berlichingen,” a drama translated by Scott.

As Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi, “It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made those gentlemen value their bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.” Though Mrs. Gaines is considered “white trash,” she becomes a lady who controls the lives of the slaves in her household. Susan, a slave, says,

“Well, chile, you can’t speck any ting else from ole missis. She come from down in Carlina, from ’mong de poor white trash. She doesn’t know any better. You can’t speck nothin’ more dan a jump from a frog. Missis says she is one of de akastocacy; but she ain’t no more of an akastocacy dan I is.”

Like many of the Southern white men during that period, Mrs. Gaines’s husband has his eyes on Melinda, a biracial slave whose husband Glen, a slave of a relative of Dr. Gaines, is seen as an obstacle to the rape of Melinda. Mrs. Gaines knows, as do many of the plantation mistresses, that he has love interests on the side. A dinner guest comments about how much the servants resemble Gaines. A similar comment was made about the help by a French visitor to Monticello, who observed that the servants resembled Jefferson. Though much has been made about Jefferson’s pursuit of his mistress Sally Hemings, another oral tradition casts him as promiscuous. Southern men saw Black women as not only fulfilling their labor needs but their sexual needs as well. (The privileged Northeastern white men left, right, and in-between who continue to monopolize commentary about the recent election missed the real reason for Kamala Harris’s defeat. Donald Trump reached back to the old stereotype of the promiscuous slave wench to defame the former vice president and to appeal to the millions of pathetic individuals who form the “manosphere.”)

My only regret is that neo-slave narratives—a category that I introduced—have become products.

In his letter to William Gatewood, Henry Bibb reveals that the slave mistress could wield the cowhide as furiously as the master. So does Mrs. Gaines, who punishes her “servant” Hannah and even dictates whom she could marry. Hannah’s love, Sam, has been sold. Though the slave master is the villain in popular culture, some white women also bought and exploited slaves. Slavery products, books, films, college courses, and so on are a huge industry, yet one of the more important books has received little notice. In They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, author Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers writes that slave-owning women not only witnessed the most brutal features of slavery, but they took part in them, profited from them, and defended them. I doubt there will be a film version of this book. The usual defense of white women, such as Alexander Hamilton’s wife and sister-in-law, is that they didn’t know what was going on. Yet they grew up in their father’s Albany mansion, where slaves were brutalized.

There is an attempt to include Native American culture in the novel. Visiting a San Francisco school, I once found a picture book about the myths of the Tlingit tribe of southeastern Alaska. The myth of the Raven attracted my attention. I conveyed my interest to writer and publisher Robert Callahan, whose interest in Native American culture—his press was called Turtle Island—brought him into contact with Native American intellectuals. One of them was Andrew Hope III, a Tlingit leader and writer. My use of the Raven from Tlingit mythology in Flight to Canada, including naming the novel’s protagonist Raven Quickskill (the surname Quickskill came from a comment that a bystander once made when I debated an opponent; she said that my style was the quick kill), led to a number of trips to Alaska. Hope and I became friends and my partner, Carla, became close to his wife, the late Elizabeth Hope, also known as Sister Goodwin, of the Inupiaq tribe. Carla edited Sister Goodwin’s book of poetry, A Lagoon Is in My Backyard. The couple named their second son Ishmael Hope, and Carla and I were listed as honorary pallbearers at Andy’s funeral. In 1998 I was made an honorary member of the Tlingit Raven clan, and my inauguration at the potlatch ceremony required that I do a Halibut dance.

There is a vaudevillian relationship between Raven and an Indian woman named Qua Qua Tralaralara. This name came from a Vaudeville poster given to me by my students at the University of Buffalo. My father’s mother was a Cherokee woman whom my grandfather met in an Indian school in Tennessee. I don’t push this connection because the Cherokee were among the most racist of Native American tribes. Indeed, one of the most prominent of the slave revolts was against the Cherokee.

It’s ironic that Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada, considered commercial failures at the time of their publication, continue to attract readers after fifty years. My only regret is that neo-slave narratives—a category that I introduced—have become products. This has led to disasters like Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

A character named Ishmael Reed complains about this commercialization of the neo-slave narrative in my novel Conjugating Hindi, in which he points to a Wall Street Journal article about the possibility of slave products—books and films—becoming ripe for investors. Of course, the mainstream prefers that Black writers dwell on the past, not that books about the slavery period can’t be great. Margaret Walker’s Jubilee is a candidate for the Great American Novel, but it’s the present in which Blacks are catching hell, when those elected to office and unelected billionaires believe making Nazi salutes is fun.

The final irony is that the Black African descendants of those who sold Blacks into slavery are portraying Black American slaves in film, because traditional American-born Black actors are regarded as troublemakers by the film industry. One could say that these African families have been paid twice: they sold us into slavery, and now their descendants play the role of slaves in movies.

So, two books that were considered commercially dead at the time are still around fifty years later. Most of my novels are still available, the most recent of which have received few reviews in the United States, but have been reviewed in Africa, Europe, Japan, China, and India. I call this my global strategy because mainstream U.S. critics only tolerate one minority diva or divo at a time. I’ve seen divas and divos come and go while I’m still “Writin’ and Fightin.’” If it weren’t for the Black media in New York, along with the Nuyorican Poets Café theater and Theater for the New City communities, and my home base Berkeley’s Black Repertory Group, I couldn’t fill the seats at my plays. While these plays are ignored by the mainstream media, they receive solid backing from the Black media of New York. But, like the fugitive slaves, I have found a home for my recent novels and nonfiction works. They are published by Baraka Books, based in Montreal, Canada.

Judging from the careers of Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada, my books that have sold poorly and been ignored by the mainstream media, which still offers a spot to one Black writer at a time, should also be around for another fifty years. They might even reach William Wells Brown and Henry Bibb’s record. Bibb’s letter to his “owner” was published in 1844 and is still anthologized. Brown’s play, The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom, was published in 1858. Though not performed during his lifetime, it was officially produced in 1971 at Emerson College, and in 2018 at the Columbia School for the Arts.

In this prophetic work, the abolitionist Mr. White implies that if whites were forced to choose between white supremacy and the Constitution, they would uphold supremacy and reject the Constitution. It was prophetic because Southern leaders, including generals who had once sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, abandoned their allegiance to it during the Civil War. It is prophetic again. The 2024 election and its aftermath shows that millions of white Americans still prefer white supremacy over the Constitution.

From Flight to Canada (50th Anniversary Edition) by Ishmael Reed. Preface copyright © 2026. Available from Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster

African American literature black history Black literature Civil War experimental fiction Flight to Canada Ishmael Reed Scribner Simon and Schuster slavery

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty-five books including Mumbo Jumbo, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Conjugating Hindi, Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico and Malcolm and Me. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism. A regular contributor to CounterPunch and founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley for over thirty years, retiring in 2005. Reed is the only person to be nominated for the National Book Award in two categories in the same year.

Staying Warm: A Literary Review
by Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Volume 1, Number 2, Winter/Spring 1982
Editor: Kofi Natambu

Quilt I
Ishmael Reed and Al Young (Editors)

QUILT PUBLICATIONS
Berkeley, California
1984, $4.95

PHOTO (L-R): Al Young and Ishmael Reed.
Cover of QUILT 1 magazine, 1981

The past twenty years in American cultural life has brought about a massive revolution in the arts that is unprecedented in the history of the Republic. The explosion of intellectual and spiritual energy in this period is matched only by the mind-boggling level of physical activity and extremely broad range of creative expression. Innovation in Music, Theatre, Dance, and the Visual Arts has taken place so often and in so many different areas, that the fever pitch pace has left critical and public opinion dragging behind, gasping for breath. This development is no where more pronounced than in Literature, where a startling new generation of novelists, poets, essayists, and critics have overturned the stale and antiquated "standards" of Anglo-American cultural elitism. As in Music, where black instrumentalists and. composers redefined the very parameters of creativity in the realm of Sound, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American writers have brought . a new, fresh and thoroughly radical sensibility and vitality to American letters. This is manifested in particularly striking fashion within the huge "small press movement," which now publishes 98% (!) of all literature being printed and distributed in the United States. With the widespread corporate centralization and monopolization of "major" American publishing firms (the process of colossal multinational conglomerates swallowing up these institutions and systematically ridding itself of all books that don't turn a big profit through bottom-line accounting), the small presses have become absolutely invaluable sources of alternative creativity. Two individuals who epitomize the move to both independent publishing and truly radical aesthetic expression in the U.S. are Ishmael Reed and Al Young.

The emergence of the writing, editing, and publishing team of Reed and Young is one of the most extraordinary stories in the annals of 20th century American literary history. In their work and artistic vision lies a brilliant synthesis and extension of ideas that were pursued and then abandoned by American artists during the period from 1900-1940. This idea: the notion that American creative artists from a wide range of disciplines and racial, ethnic, sexual, and cultural groups could co-operate and even positively affect one another, is the social motivation and spiritual "incentive" behind the life and careers of Reed and Young. However, the particular beauty of these co-conspirators' activity and thought is that it is not marred/constrained/ restricted by divisive ideological conceits and polemics, as was the last historical attempt at artistic-political-racial unity during the 1930's. This social trap of hair-splitting factionalism and petty rhetorical dogma is not so much sidestepped as transcended. In the social cosmology of Reed and Young, the final criteria for the publication and dissemination of ideas (even ones they themselves "disagree" with) is their clarity, depth, and creative strength. The governing idea is that many diverse perspectives are not only healthy and informative, but socially necessary. It is this credo that has served both of -these prolific writers well over the past fifteen. years. In fact, their sheer productivity since the mid-1960s is astounding. Since 1967, this duo has managed between them to write and publish nine novels, seven volumes of poetry, one book of essays, one volume of autobiography, co-edit three seminal literary anthologies of poetry, prose, and nonfiction, and write for, co-edit, and publish three different literary magazines (Yardbird Reader, Y'Bird, and Quilt). If this record wasn't dazzling enough, these two Afro-American wunderkinds also help found a multi-cultural literary organization dedicated to promoting and distributing the "best writers and publications currently available from literary small presses" (The Before Columbus Foundation), written screenplays, established two small presses (I. Reed Books and Reed and Cannon Publications) and were instrumental in the conception of the American Book Awards as an alternative to the racist National Book Awards organization. This is not meant to give the impression, however, that these individuals have a fetish for quantity. The outstanding quality of their work has been duly recognized and acclaimed in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

But this, after all, is not a review of Ishmael's and Al's personal literacy successes. It is to introduce you to their latest creation: a warm, funr:iy, heavy, ass-kicking, irreverent, headbusting, eye-opening, and BEAUTIFUL publication called QUILT I. That's right, QUILT. Just like the kind your grandmother made, that richly colorful and intricate mosaic of cloth, needles, and disciplined craftsmanship. The intricate weaving and shaping of seemingly disparate patches and pieces strewn together to invent a mandala of dreams, desires, myths, and memories. This is the thematic center of this new literary magazine of prose, poetry, journalism, and graphics (including cartoons), and the basis of its brilliant variations on this illuminating metaphor for human communication and expression. I am happy to report that these outlaws have done it again!

QUILT I features a wide array of literary "patches and pieces" that are stunning in their structural and literary cont~nt and overall aesthetic design. There is a wonderful short story by the renowned Black female novelist Kristen Hunter that is a wimer in "how to write about people so well that you want to re-read the story over and over again." There is a tour de force essay by Ben Tong, who demolishes, in a hilarious and intellectually creative way, the pretensions, delusions, and narcissistic guru ravings of the now multi-million dollar "Self-Realization" industry and their pseudo-hip followers (e.g. EST, Esalen retreats, and "holistic" conferences complete with quasi-Oriental psychobabble). Tong also derides the often naive racism of these white Taoist-Shaman-Zen-African Elder groupies, and their subsequent abuse and misuse of "Eastern" religions, philosophies, and sacred rituals. The name of this essential piece is Alan Watts Was Sure One Strange Kinda Chinaman! Touché.

Those two pieces alone are worth the price of admission, but there's MORE. The poetry is uniformly excellent, from a witty and sharp translation of a famous poem by an even more famous poet (Hiccup, by the "Father of Negritude", Mr. Leon Damas), to the haunting and crystalline blues poetry of Lance Jeffers, Yusef Komunyakaa (who writes in the keys of Eb and F#), and Fae Myenne Ng. These writers put most contemporary American poets to shame as they demonstrate what the unity of idea, vision, craft, and imagery is all about (no empty form freaks here, or solipsistic rhetoricians either!). There is a very well-written and informative essay by the brilliant improvisational pianist/composer Randy Weston on Black American Music ("Jazz") that was originally a report" from the FESTAC cultural festival in Nigeria. There are devastating satiric prose pieces by James Houston on TV political assassinations, and corporate demonology (see: The Fifth Day Robert Kennedy is Shot a hallucinatory story about American violence, media manipulation, and "fear as idiology"; and Consumer Report, which is a too-good-to-be-true account of how corporate executives all view their business in the exact same way. They even say the exact same things: "It is very easy to criticize this business looking at it from the outside .... " The three "executives," by the way, are in NETWORK TV, DEFENSE WEAPONRY and HEROIN).

There are still more outstanding features of this 190-page opus, including a fantastic section of poems, prose pieces, and cartoon drawings called TELEVISION AND OTHER VISIONS. This 45-page section begins with A Poetry Reading on the Tonight Show, by poet Paul F.. Fericano, that reminds me of some of the deliriously funny and ironic blank verse of the Puerto Rican master Pedro Pietro. The section ends in a blaze of Native American funk prose by the brilliant Standing Rock Sioux writer/attorney Vine Deloria, Jr. His piece, entitled Why Me Tonto, is a slashing and uproariously funny critique of white, ''enlightened" filmmakers who try to make an artistic killing by trying to gently rope Native American people into supporting their "Redploitation" flicks. Sorta Iike Shaft on the Reservation or Coffy Was a Squaw. Needless to say, Deloria ''massacres'' these latter day bohemian Custers.

Throughout this publication is a deep and sensitive concern with the Third World artist devising his/her own political and cultural solutions to uniquely '''individual'' social dilemmas. Thus, the lucid and exciting essays by Andrew Hope, Geary Hobson, Chinweizu, and Dr. Louis Price Mars (who are respectively Eskimo, Native American, African, and Haitian writers) speak directly and eloquently to the themes each has chosen to educate the ''rest of us'' with. In each case, we get a scholarly, "inside" look at various dimensions of the multifaceted "Third World" experience. For example, Andrew Hope systematically takes apart the neo-misslonary white poets and politicians like Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, the Federal Government's various environmental agencies, and.their arch-nemesis — the pro-environmentalist lobbies, who all think they know best" what the Native Alaskan people . . . . need most. (Snyder calls them "a rootless population who are moving from place to place" and remarks that "most of us are twentieth century waifs, rootless and as attached to liberat white values as anyone else.") Snyder goes on to say that the concept of imperialism (which he claims is nothing but the invocation of ''tiberal white values'') doesn't apply to poetry and literature, because "we all know we are free to take anything we want" in the arts. The interesting thing about all this is that these new-not-sobenevolent-imperialists think that they are doing the Native people a "spiritual favor" by bringing these "primitive nomads" their philosophies. Well, Snyder and his literary cronies may "know" that, but it's NEWS to us "non-Anglo" folks sez Hope (and I add a hearty amen!). Besides, this whole notion of "taking anything we want" is what caused this problem in the first place. Hope calls his piece Rootless Primitives Need Land Masters. Get it? As my grandmother often says, "White folks got a lotta nerve."

Finally, in a magazine crammed to the brim with fantastic and mind-bending surprises, I offer you the piece de resistance and the biggest coup in American letters in many years: a full-length interview with Truman Capote(!) of all people, who, in a wide-ranging and extremely candid discussion with black novelist and screenwriter Cecil Brown, says that about 60% of everything in America originated with black culture and that "black people have been ripped off by practically everybody in America." l'm not going to spoil the surprise by revealing any more of this extraordinary interview (wait until you see what else Capote has to say!), nor am I going to mention the content of the amazing cartoons and graphics by. artists lezley Saar and Futzig Nutzle (you won't believe me, anyway). Just go out and get QUILT. It will definitely restore your faith in literature. There is a tremendous amount of Love, Intelligence, and Passion in this multicolored garment & it's one surefire way to keep warm this winter.

ISHMAEL REED: THE HOODOO TEXT
by Kofi Natambu
Detroit Metro Times
December 6, 1984

“A novel can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumbling of wild men saddled by demons...”
—The Loop Garoo Kid from: Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 1968

“We welcome a time in history when ‘American’ is no longer interchangeable with rudeness, grossness and provincialism, but has begun to stand for a society where all of the cultures of the world may co-exist, and in which cultural exchange is allowed to thrive.”
—Ishmael Reed, Before Columbus Foundation, 1978

Writing is strictly a “put up or shut up” game. In any group of thinking people even the most brilliant talker can’t get by on oral skills alone. You know at some point that some seriously wisecracking observer is going to say “Yeah that sounds good, but where is the evidence?” If a stuttering silence ensues then everyone will grab their drinks and slide onto the dance floor. Talk about case closed?!?

One of the best things about being a truly great writer like Ishmael Reed is that you never have to worry about being embarrassed in this way. You see, the text is the evidence and as long as the text is being written (and read) the case is never closed. Language is like that and in the hands of a genuine master like Reed we experience the extraordinary power of words to create, shape, and change what we so blithely call “reality.” It is from this angle of vision that we gain liberating insights into what the art of writing is really all about.

In the case of Reed we also discover the endlessly creative capacity of language to eclipse even the mighty force of public personality. You see, Ishmael Reed is not by any stretch of the imagination your run-of-the-mill scribe or human being. Born on February 22, 1938, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Reed is one of the most prolific writers in all of American letters over the past 17 years. His record in terms of sheer literary productivity alone is simply amazing-- as the author of six highly acclaimed novels, four volumes of poetry, three books of essays, two plays, editor of three major literary anthologies and three legendary literary magazines (Yardbird Reader; Y’Bird, and Quilt), Reed is a veritable one man writing and publishing industry.

Not too shabby for a young black man of working-class origins who dropped out of the University of Buffalo in his junior year in 1960, yet went on to teach at Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of California at Berkeley, and who has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and twice for the National Book Award in poetry and fiction. In spite of this grudging recognition by this country’s literary establishment, Reed was the prime mover behind the founding of the American Book Awards organization to combat the racism and cultural discrimination of these other virtually lily-white institutions. In addition, Reed runs his own publishing firm (wryly called I. Reed Books) and is widely considered one of the major leaders of the now gigantic small press movement in the U.S. over the past 20 years.

So you can see why it is absolutely necessary to talk about a number of Ishmael Reeds. One of them is the writing dynamo whose wildly creative use of what Reed refers to as the Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic is an uproarious and brilliantly satirical take-off on the historical and present-day foibles, fears, dreams, ideas, values, and stupidities that rule Western culture and society. The eternal target of Reed’s critical and parodic assault on what Reed derisively calls the “Western Church” is the received forms and styles of writing from both the (ancient and modern) Western and Afro-American literary traditions. Upon this edifice Reed attacks and deconstructs (demystifies) the metaphysical presuppositions, assumptions, and attitudes inherent in the philosophical structure of Western cultures whose blind and crippling ignorance has led to one-dimensional and oppressive ideas about ‘race,’ ‘sex,’ ‘politics,’ ‘art,’ ‘law,’ ‘morality,’ ‘economics,’ etc., that allows for and creates destructive and exploitive ways of life.

Thus the emblems that Reed satirizes and engages in complex polemics with are Christianity, the hypocrisy and distortion of democratic ideals, the deeply embedded lies concerning American and world history, the absurdly reductive and finally schizophrenic mind-set of the Greco-Roman rationalist tradition, and the resultant horrific attempts to institutionalize/rationalize various forms of slavery, colonialism, and genocide. Lest anyone get the mistaken notion that Reed’s writing is in any way lectern-sleepy it would be wise to guess again. There are very few writers in the world today who could match the brash, sizzling vitality of Reed at his howling, driving best. His is an utterly unique and visionary style that draws on a very wide spectrum of American vernacular forms. In such hilarious and densely complex books as Mumbo Jumbo, The Freelance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Conjure, A Secretary to the Spirits, Flight to Canada, and The Terrible Twos (dig these titles!!), Reed consciously uses the artistic legacy of TV, vaudeville, comic strips, minstrelsy, Jazz, film, painting, journalism, folklore, religious iconography, burlesque, etc., to create and develop his own ‘fictions.’ All techniques are put in the service of a scholarly yet outrageously adventurous mind/spirit intent upon getting us to see/hear/feel/conceive “accepted realities” in completely fresh and new ways. By signifying on what we say is real (about humanity, culture, and art) Reed shows us through the revelatory act of writing that Magic and Science are not, nor have they ever been, mutually exclusive categories. Reed is after no less than a “revolution of the imagination” where the active power of art will not only release us from stale conventions and monolithic experience but give us the intellectual and spiritual energy to transform our lives.

Finally, Reed reminds that any text is open to a multitude of interpretations or “readings” and that all human experience, like art, is open-ended and made intelligible through the processes of creativity and communication. America is not one culture, but multi-cultural. We are what we create (and recreate).

In these days of national amnesia and mindless cynicism where dangerously shallow mythmakers like Reagan rule vicariously through our willful ignorance, meanest fears and smug hatreds, it is crucial to have thinking and compassionate artists like Ishmael Reed around. Great writing not only teaches us to rigorously question what we are “led to believe” but to explore with vigorous honesty and humor the very foundations of our existence. As always, Reed is at the literary cutting edge of what is truly radical and imaginative in American writing today. To paraphrase one of his reviewers, to miss him is to miss out on “one of the great creations of this era.”

UPDATE: Reed was the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship in 1998. In 2000, a 500-page anthology of his collected work entitled The Reed Reader was published by Basic Books.

Book Review:

Reckless Eyeballing by Ishmael Reed, St. Martin’s Press, 1986

The Writer As Seer and Modern Oracle
by Kofi Natambu
City Arts Quarterly
Detroit Council of the Arts
Winter, 1987

The innovative strength of Ishmael Reed’s writing has always been his masterful use of language anchored to a critically dynamic aesthetic that is based firmly on ancient and modern ‘New World’ vernacular sources of knowledge and values. This aesthetic (known as Neo-HooDoo) allows Reed the creative and analytical latitude to probe and comment upon the historical and present-day ideas, values, fears, foibles, dreams, myths, and stupidities that rule Western culture and society. In the context of the United States this means a profound awareness and critique of the matrix of social significations and cultural myths and contradictions that allow for and create oppressive ideas and belief-systems.

In his new book Reed’s international literary reputation as an extremely perceptive and penetrating observer and critic of the dominant attitudes and values ruling contemporary American life is solidly upheld and extended. In this book (Reed’s seventh novel and 17th book in 19 years), the focus is once again the historical identity of that motley multicultural group of human beings called “Americans” and how they clumsily and violently “respond” to their experience with/of one another. In Reckless Eyeballing we get a bristling and often darkly hilarious account of how these concerns/issues affect blacks and whites, men and women, Jews and Christians, artists and politicians, straights and gays, writers and criminals in the late 20th century (read: NOW).

Using his patented and deadly accurate satirical blade to cut through the pervasive hypocrisies, distortions, and lies of contemporary American “reality” Reed confronts us with a scathing narrative that fearlessly takes on and exposes the corruption and brutality of such ancient oppressions as racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and caste and class exploitation as they play themselves out in the frenzied artistic and political worlds of today’s society.

But as a writer this is far from Ishmael’s only concern. For the characters in this book are not merely quasi-allegorical archetypes who ‘represent’ various points-of-view in the course of the story, but literary tropes signifying active states of consciousness. In this way Reed is able to thoroughly examine and critique the effects of ignorance and bigotry as they manifest themselves within the formal context of the novel.

What results is a withering and wickedly funny portrayal of how ‘Americans’ use their various inherited oppressions to manipulate, exploit, and destroy each other, all the while justifying their vicious, self-serving behavior by hiding behind the socially sanctioned categories of race, sex, class, caste and religion. What Reed also reveals is that alternatives that rely on shallow and dogmatic uses of ideological formulas lead to even more comprehensive forms of oppression and misery. In this book it is the smug self-righteousness of characters who perceive themselves as “politically conscious” and “avant-garde” who are almost uniformly paranoid, manipulative, and opportunist individuals. It is these cynical hipsters who use their public and professional status as “Feminists,” “Nationalists,” “Liberals,” and “Marxists” as well as “writers,” “musicians,” “police officers,” and “critics,” as an excuse to inflict severe psychic and physical pain on others. In this way they all avoid taking personal responsibility for their own complicity in maintaining society’s oppressions and repressions.

In this utterly self-destructive universe nearly everyone—male and female alike—are con-artists, shysters, bullies, fools, jackals, and backstabbers because they allow their hatreds, frustrations, fears and ‘ambitions’ to tyrannize them and lend a false credibility to their predatory actions. Reed asserts that the price of ignorance, fear, cynicism, and bigotry is always oppression and slavery and that it doesn’t matter what racial, sexual, economic, political, or religious identity one happens to have. In the absence of real knowledge, compassion, understanding, faith, respect, and insight (i.e. Wisdom), being “correct” and “angry” only translates into another form of fascism.

The “plotline” of this book concerns the (mis)adventures of a talented but weak-willed southern black male playwright named Ian Ball who lives in New York and wants to be a big ‘American Dream’ success on Broadway. However he has had his work “sex-listed” by theater feminists for the sexism of an earlier play he has written and now he wishes to “redeem himself’ (and thereby get back in the good graces of a powerful lobby of white and black feminists who control, through censorship, what is being produced). He opportunistically decides to write a play in which only women get all the good parts. The name of the play is (you guessed it) Reckless Eyeballing. Ball is backed and supported by a powerful Jewish producer named Jim Minsk and a preeminent, black playwright named Jack Brashford who has gotten famous and wealthy on the strength of only one play. But Minsk is murdered by an anti-semitic mob of white Southerners and Ball finds himself and his faltering career at the mercy of Tremonisha Smarts, a famous black feminist playwright and Becky French, a feared white feminist producer who supports all of Ms. Smarts literary efforts (she even handles her bookings). What happens to Ball and his white and black, male and female friends and enemies in this postmodern farce is a frightening and perversely uproarious portrait of the current literary ‘scene.’

In this brilliant 148 page text, Reed spares no one as he uses an illuminating synthesis of verbal rifling, linguistic word-play, puns, neologisms, historical scholarship, jazz-inspired prose and conventional narrative techniques and strategies to make all of us face up to, and deal with, the pain of our common experience as human beings trapped in a racist and sexist society that values cant and lies over the truth. It is also a powerful and welcome antidote to the pervasive bad writing that characterizes so much of the fictional literature that attempts to explore the theme of ‘modern life’ in the United States today. As always, Reed is at the literary cutting edge of what is truly radical and imaginative in American writing. Reckless Eyeballing is further evidence that Ishmael is still hard at work pursuing new creative possibilities for the novel as a literary form of expression. To miss his inspiring work is to miss out on one of the major literary voices of our time.

[See back cover of book here]:

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: On By And About the legendary and innovative writer, artist, and critic Ishmael Reed and his extraordinary life, art, and legacy alongside various reviews, critiques, analyses, encomiums, and celebrations by Kofi Natambu

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 11:51:24 +0000

https://lithub.com/reinventing-the-slave-narrative-ishmael-reed-on-flight-to-canada-at-50/

ISHMAEL REED (b. February 22, 1938)

Reinventing the Slave Narrative: Ishmael Reed on Flight to Canada at 50

“Traditionally, mainstream critics have viewed Black writers as apprentices of white masters.”

Via Scribner

by Ishmael Reed

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty-five books including Mumbo Jumbo, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Conjugating Hindi, Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico and Malcolm and Me. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism. A regular contributor to CounterPunch and founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley for over thirty years, retiring in 2005. Reed is the only person to be nominated for the National Book Award in two categories in the same year.

Staying Warm: A Literary Review
by Kofi Natambu

Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Volume 1, Number 2, Winter/Spring 1982
Editor: Kofi Natambu

Quilt I
Ishmael Reed and Al Young (Editors)

QUILT PUBLICATIONS
Berkeley, California
1984, $4.95

PHOTO (L-R): Al Young and Ishmael Reed.

Cover of QUILT 1 magazine, 1981

The past twenty years in American cultural life has brought about a massive revolution in the arts that is unprecedented in the history of the Republic. The explosion of intellectual and spiritual energy in this period is matched only by the mind-boggling level of physical activity and extremely broad range of creative expression. Innovation in Music, Theatre, Dance, and the Visual Arts has taken place so often and in so many different areas, that the fever pitch pace has left critical and public opinion dragging behind, gasping for breath. This development is no where more pronounced than in Literature, where a startling new generation of novelists, poets, essayists, and critics have overturned the stale and antiquated "standards" of Anglo-American cultural elitism. As in Music, where black instrumentalists and. composers redefined the very parameters of creativity in the realm of Sound, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American writers have brought . a new, fresh and thoroughly radical sensibility and vitality to American letters. This is manifested in particularly striking fashion within the huge "small press movement," which now publishes 98% (!) of all literature being printed and distributed in the United States. With the widespread corporate centralization and monopolization of "major" American publishing firms (the process of colossal multinational conglomerates swallowing up these institutions and systematically ridding itself of all books that don't turn a big profit through bottom-line accounting), the small presses have become absolutely invaluable sources of alternative creativity. Two individuals who epitomize the move to both independent publishing and truly radical aesthetic expression in the U.S. are Ishmael Reed and Al Young.

The emergence of the writing, editing, and publishing team of Reed and Young is one of the most extraordinary stories in the annals of 20th century American literary history. In their work and artistic vision lies a brilliant synthesis and extension of ideas that were pursued and then abandoned by American artists during the period from 1900-1940. This idea: the notion that American creative artists from a wide range of disciplines and racial, ethnic, sexual, and cultural groups could co-operate and even positively affect one another, is the social motivation and spiritual "incentive" behind the life and careers of Reed and Young. However, the particular beauty of these co-conspirators' activity and thought is that it is not marred/constrained/ restricted by divisive ideological conceits and polemics, as was the last historical attempt at artistic-political-racial unity during the 1930's. This social trap of hair-splitting factionalism and petty rhetorical dogma is not so much sidestepped as transcended. In the social cosmology of Reed and Young, the final criteria for the publication and dissemination of ideas (even ones they themselves "disagree" with) is their clarity, depth, and creative strength. The governing idea is that many diverse perspectives are not only healthy and informative, but socially necessary. It is this credo that has served both of -these prolific writers well over the past fifteen. years. In fact, their sheer productivity since the mid-1960s is astounding. Since 1967, this duo has managed between them to write and publish nine novels, seven volumes of poetry, one book of essays, one volume of autobiography, co-edit three seminal literary anthologies of poetry, prose, and nonfiction, and write for, co-edit, and publish three different literary magazines (Yardbird Reader, Y'Bird, and Quilt). If this record wasn't dazzling enough, these two Afro-American wunderkinds also help found a multi-cultural literary organization dedicated to promoting and distributing the "best writers and publications currently available from literary small presses" (The Before Columbus Foundation), written screenplays, established two small presses (I. Reed Books and Reed and Cannon Publications) and were instrumental in the conception of the American Book Awards as an alternative to the racist National Book Awards organization. This is not meant to give the impression, however, that these individuals have a fetish for quantity. The outstanding quality of their work has been duly recognized and acclaimed in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

But this, after all, is not a review of Ishmael's and Al's personal literacy successes. It is to introduce you to their latest creation: a warm, funr:iy, heavy, ass-kicking, irreverent, headbusting, eye-opening, and BEAUTIFUL publication called QUILT I. That's right, QUILT. Just like the kind your grandmother made, that richly colorful and intricate mosaic of cloth, needles, and disciplined craftsmanship. The intricate weaving and shaping of seemingly disparate patches and pieces strewn together to invent a mandala of dreams, desires, myths, and memories. This is the thematic center of this new literary magazine of prose, poetry, journalism, and graphics (including cartoons), and the basis of its brilliant variations on this illuminating metaphor for human communication and expression. I am happy to report that these outlaws have done it again!

QUILT I features a wide array of literary "patches and pieces" that are stunning in their structural and literary cont~nt and overall aesthetic design. There is a wonderful short story by the renowned Black female novelist Kristen Hunter that is a wimer in "how to write about people so well that you want to re-read the story over and over again." There is a tour de force essay by Ben Tong, who demolishes, in a hilarious and intellectually creative way, the pretensions, delusions, and narcissistic guru ravings of the now multi-million dollar "Self-Realization" industry and their pseudo-hip followers (e.g. EST, Esalen retreats, and "holistic" conferences complete with quasi-Oriental psychobabble). Tong also derides the often naive racism of these white Taoist-Shaman-Zen-African Elder groupies, and their subsequent abuse and misuse of "Eastern" religions, philosophies, and sacred rituals. The name of this essential piece is Alan Watts Was Sure One Strange Kinda Chinaman! Touché.

Those two pieces alone are worth the price of admission, but there's MORE. The poetry is uniformly excellent, from a witty and sharp translation of a famous poem by an even more famous poet (Hiccup, by the "Father of Negritude", Mr. Leon Damas), to the haunting and crystalline blues poetry of Lance Jeffers, Yusef Komunyakaa (who writes in the keys of Eb and F#), and Fae Myenne Ng. These writers put most contemporary American poets to shame as they demonstrate what the unity of idea, vision, craft, and imagery is all about (no empty form freaks here, or solipsistic rhetoricians either!). There is a very well-written and informative essay by the brilliant improvisational pianist/composer Randy Weston on Black American Music ("Jazz") that was originally a report" from the FESTAC cultural festival in Nigeria. There are devastating satiric prose pieces by James Houston on TV political assassinations, and corporate demonology (see: The Fifth Day Robert Kennedy is Shot a hallucinatory story about American violence, media manipulation, and "fear as idiology"; and Consumer Report, which is a too-good-to-be-true account of how corporate executives all view their business in the exact same way. They even say the exact same things: "It is very easy to criticize this business looking at it from the outside .... " The three "executives," by the way, are in NETWORK TV, DEFENSE WEAPONRY and HEROIN).

There are still more outstanding features of this 190-page opus, including a fantastic section of poems, prose pieces, and cartoon drawings called TELEVISION AND OTHER VISIONS. This 45-page section begins with A Poetry Reading on the Tonight Show, by poet Paul F.. Fericano, that reminds me of some of the deliriously funny and ironic blank verse of the Puerto Rican master Pedro Pietro. The section ends in a blaze of Native American funk prose by the brilliant Standing Rock Sioux writer/attorney Vine Deloria, Jr. His piece, entitled Why Me Tonto, is a slashing and uproariously funny critique of white, ''enlightened" filmmakers who try to make an artistic killing by trying to gently rope Native American people into supporting their "Redploitation" flicks. Sorta Iike Shaft on the Reservation or Coffy Was a Squaw. Needless to say, Deloria ''massacres'' these latter day bohemian Custers.

Throughout this publication is a deep and sensitive concern with the Third World artist devising his/her own political and cultural solutions to uniquely '''individual'' social dilemmas. Thus, the lucid and exciting essays by Andrew Hope, Geary Hobson, Chinweizu, and Dr. Louis Price Mars (who are respectively Eskimo, Native American, African, and Haitian writers) speak directly and eloquently to the themes each has chosen to educate the ''rest of us'' with. In each case, we get a scholarly, "inside" look at various dimensions of the multifaceted "Third World" experience. For example, Andrew Hope systematically takes apart the neo-misslonary white poets and politicians like Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, the Federal Government's various environmental agencies, and.their arch-nemesis — the pro-environmentalist lobbies, who all think they know best" what the Native Alaskan people . . . . need most. (Snyder calls them "a rootless population who are moving from place to place" and remarks that "most of us are twentieth century waifs, rootless and as attached to liberat white values as anyone else.") Snyder goes on to say that the concept of imperialism (which he claims is nothing but the invocation of ''tiberal white values'') doesn't apply to poetry and literature, because "we all know we are free to take anything we want" in the arts. The interesting thing about all this is that these new-not-sobenevolent-imperialists think that they are doing the Native people a "spiritual favor" by bringing these "primitive nomads" their philosophies. Well, Snyder and his literary cronies may "know" that, but it's NEWS to us "non-Anglo" folks sez Hope (and I add a hearty amen!). Besides, this whole notion of "taking anything we want" is what caused this problem in the first place. Hope calls his piece Rootless Primitives Need Land Masters. Get it? As my grandmother often says, "White folks got a lotta nerve."

Finally, in a magazine crammed to the brim with fantastic and mind-bending surprises, I offer you the piece de resistance and the biggest coup in American letters in many years: a full-length interview with Truman Capote(!) of all people, who, in a wide-ranging and extremely candid discussion with black novelist and screenwriter Cecil Brown, says that about 60% of everything in America originated with black culture and that "black people have been ripped off by practically everybody in America." l'm not going to spoil the surprise by revealing any more of this extraordinary interview (wait until you see what else Capote has to say!), nor am I going to mention the content of the amazing cartoons and graphics by. artists lezley Saar and Futzig Nutzle (you won't believe me, anyway). Just go out and get QUILT. It will definitely restore your faith in literature. There is a tremendous amount of Love, Intelligence, and Passion in this multicolored garment & it's one surefire way to keep warm this winter.

ISHMAEL REED: THE HOODOO TEXT
by Kofi Natambu
Detroit Metro Times
December 6, 1984

“A novel can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumbling of wild men saddled by demons...”
—The Loop Garoo Kid from: Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 1968

“We welcome a time in history when ‘American’ is no longer interchangeable with rudeness, grossness and provincialism, but has begun to stand for a society where all of the cultures of the world may co-exist, and in which cultural exchange is allowed to thrive.”
—Ishmael Reed, Before Columbus Foundation, 1978

Writing is strictly a “put up or shut up” game. In any group of thinking people even the most brilliant talker can’t get by on oral skills alone. You know at some point that some seriously wisecracking observer is going to say “Yeah that sounds good, but where is the evidence?” If a stuttering silence ensues then everyone will grab their drinks and slide onto the dance floor. Talk about case closed?!?

One of the best things about being a truly great writer like Ishmael Reed is that you never have to worry about being embarrassed in this way. You see, the text is the evidence and as long as the text is being written (and read) the case is never closed. Language is like that and in the hands of a genuine master like Reed we experience the extraordinary power of words to create, shape, and change what we so blithely call “reality.” It is from this angle of vision that we gain liberating insights into what the art of writing is really all about.

In the case of Reed we also discover the endlessly creative capacity of language to eclipse even the mighty force of public personality. You see, Ishmael Reed is not by any stretch of the imagination your run-of-the-mill scribe or human being. Born on February 22, 1938, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Reed is one of the most prolific writers in all of American letters over the past 17 years. His record in terms of sheer literary productivity alone is simply amazing-- as the author of six highly acclaimed novels, four volumes of poetry, three books of essays, two plays, editor of three major literary anthologies and three legendary literary magazines (Yardbird Reader; Y’Bird, and Quilt), Reed is a veritable one man writing and publishing industry.

Not too shabby for a young black man of working-class origins who dropped out of the University of Buffalo in his junior year in 1960, yet went on to teach at Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of California at Berkeley, and who has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and twice for the National Book Award in poetry and fiction. In spite of this grudging recognition by this country’s literary establishment, Reed was the prime mover behind the founding of the American Book Awards organization to combat the racism and cultural discrimination of these other virtually lily-white institutions. In addition, Reed runs his own publishing firm (wryly called I. Reed Books) and is widely considered one of the major leaders of the now gigantic small press movement in the U.S. over the past 20 years.

So you can see why it is absolutely necessary to talk about a number of Ishmael Reeds. One of them is the writing dynamo whose wildly creative use of what Reed refers to as the Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic is an uproarious and brilliantly satirical take-off on the historical and present-day foibles, fears, dreams, ideas, values, and stupidities that rule Western culture and society. The eternal target of Reed’s critical and parodic assault on what Reed derisively calls the “Western Church” is the received forms and styles of writing from both the (ancient and modern) Western and Afro-American literary traditions. Upon this edifice Reed attacks and deconstructs (demystifies) the metaphysical presuppositions, assumptions, and attitudes inherent in the philosophical structure of Western cultures whose blind and crippling ignorance has led to one-dimensional and oppressive ideas about ‘race,’ ‘sex,’ ‘politics,’ ‘art,’ ‘law,’ ‘morality,’ ‘economics,’ etc., that allows for and creates destructive and exploitive ways of life.

Thus the emblems that Reed satirizes and engages in complex polemics with are Christianity, the hypocrisy and distortion of democratic ideals, the deeply embedded lies concerning American and world history, the absurdly reductive and finally schizophrenic mind-set of the Greco-Roman rationalist tradition, and the resultant horrific attempts to institutionalize/rationalize various forms of slavery, colonialism, and genocide. Lest anyone get the mistaken notion that Reed’s writing is in any way lectern-sleepy it would be wise to guess again. There are very few writers in the world today who could match the brash, sizzling vitality of Reed at his howling, driving best. His is an utterly unique and visionary style that draws on a very wide spectrum of American vernacular forms. In such hilarious and densely complex books as Mumbo Jumbo, The Freelance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Conjure, A Secretary to the Spirits, Flight to Canada, and The Terrible Twos (dig these titles!!), Reed consciously uses the artistic legacy of TV, vaudeville, comic strips, minstrelsy, Jazz, film, painting, journalism, folklore, religious iconography, burlesque, etc., to create and develop his own ‘fictions.’ All techniques are put in the service of a scholarly yet outrageously adventurous mind/spirit intent upon getting us to see/hear/feel/conceive “accepted realities” in completely fresh and new ways. By signifying on what we say is real (about humanity, culture, and art) Reed shows us through the revelatory act of writing that Magic and Science are not, nor have they ever been, mutually exclusive categories. Reed is after no less than a “revolution of the imagination” where the active power of art will not only release us from stale conventions and monolithic experience but give us the intellectual and spiritual energy to transform our lives.

Finally, Reed reminds that any text is open to a multitude of interpretations or “readings” and that all human experience, like art, is open-ended and made intelligible through the processes of creativity and communication. America is not one culture, but multi-cultural. We are what we create (and recreate).

In these days of national amnesia and mindless cynicism where dangerously shallow mythmakers like Reagan rule vicariously through our willful ignorance, meanest fears and smug hatreds, it is crucial to have thinking and compassionate artists like Ishmael Reed around. Great writing not only teaches us to rigorously question what we are “led to believe” but to explore with vigorous honesty and humor the very foundations of our existence. As always, Reed is at the literary cutting edge of what is truly radical and imaginative in American writing today. To paraphrase one of his reviewers, to miss him is to miss out on “one of the great creations of this era.”

UPDATE: Reed was the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship in 1998. In 2000, a 500-page anthology of his collected work entitled The Reed Reader was published by Basic Books.

Book Review:

Reckless Eyeballing by Ishmael Reed, St. Martin’s Press, 1986
The Writer As Seer and Modern Oracle
by Kofi Natambu
City Arts Quarterly
Detroit Council of the Arts
Winter, 1987

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty-five books including Mumbo Jumbo, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Conjugating Hindi, Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico and Malcolm and Me. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism. A regular contributor to CounterPunch and founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley for over thirty years, retiring in 2005. Reed is the only person to be nominated for the National Book Award in two categories in the same year.

https://newyorktrendnyc.com/2026/09/ishmael-reeds-flight-to-canada-returns-for-50th-anniversary-edition/

Ishmael Reed’s ‘Flight to Canada’ Returns for 50th Anniversary Edition

September 15, 2026 | NEW YORK TREND | Books

Ishmael Reed’s acclaimed novel Flight to Canada is returning to readers with a new 50th anniversary edition from Scribner, introducing the groundbreaking work to a new generation while revisiting one of Reed’s most inventive examinations of race, slavery and American history.

The anniversary edition features a new foreword by Reed and a fresh introduction by author Victor LaValle. The reissue also comes with a new book jacket, giving the celebrated novel a refreshed presentation for contemporary readers.

Originally published in 1976, Flight to Canada follows Raven Quickskill, an enslaved poet who escapes from a Virginia plantation with two other enslaved people. While his companions are satisfied with reaching freedom partway, Quickskill is determined to make it all the way to Canada.

His escape sets off a pursuit by his enslaver, Arthur Swille, who is determined to reclaim him. But Reed’s novel quickly moves beyond the conventions of a traditional fugitive slave narrative.

Using satire, fantasy, historical references and high comedy, Reed creates an unconventional portrait of the Civil War era and the United States. In the novel, historical figures and modern cultural elements collide, creating intentionally surreal situations that challenge readers to reconsider how American history is remembered and represented.

Quickskill’s journey includes an extraordinary flight to Canada aboard a jumbo jet, while Abraham Lincoln appears in plantation settings and elements of modern television culture enter the world of the 19th century. Through these imaginative departures from historical realism, Reed examines the relationship between slavery, freedom, race and American mythology.

The result is a novel that uses humor and absurdity to explore serious questions about the nation’s past and its continuing influence on American life.

Reed is the author of more than 25 books and plays, including Mumbo Jumbo, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Conjugating Hindi, Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico and The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda. His work has also extended into radio, television, music and publishing.

A longtime professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Reed spent more than three decades teaching at the university. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award. He has also been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award in two categories in the same year.

With its 50th anniversary edition, Flight to Canada continues Reed’s tradition of using satire and unconventional storytelling to examine American history and Black identity.

The new edition is available through Simon & Schuster.

Staying Warm: A Literary Review
by Kofi Natambu
Quilt I
Ishmael Reed and Al Young (Editors)

QUILT PUBLICATIONS
Berkeley, California
1984, $4.95

Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Volume 1, Number 2, Winter/Spring 1982
Editor: Kofi Natambu

PHOTO (L-R): Al Young and Ishmael Reed.

Cover of QUILT 1 magazine, 1981

“A novel can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumbling of wild men saddled by demons...”
—The Loop Garoo Kid from: Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 1968

“We welcome a time in history when ‘American’ is no longer interchangeable with rudeness, grossness and provincialism, but has begun to stand for a society where all of the cultures of the world may co-exist, and in which cultural exchange is allowed to thrive.”
—Ishmael Reed, Before Columbus Foundation, 1978

Writing is strictly a “put up or shut up” game. In any group of thinking people even the most brilliant talker can’t get by on oral skills alone. You know at some point that some seriously wisecracking observer is going to say “Yeah that sounds good, but where is the evidence?” If a stuttering silence ensues then everyone will grab their drinks and slide onto the dance floor. Talk about case closed?!?

One of the best things about being a truly great writer like Ishmael Reed is that you never have to worry about being embarrassed in this way. You see, the text is the evidence and as long as the text is being written (and read) the case is never closed. Language is like that and in the hands of a genuine master like Reed we experience the extraordinary power of words to create, shape, and change what we so blithely call “reality.” It is from this angle of vision that we gain liberating insights into what the art of writing is really all about.

In the case of Reed we also discover the endlessly creative capacity of language to eclipse even the mighty force of public personality. You see, Ishmael Reed is not by any stretch of the imagination your run-of-the-mill scribe or human being. Born on February 22, 1938, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Reed is one of the most prolific writers in all of American letters over the past 17 years. His record in terms of sheer literary productivity alone is simply amazing-- as the author of six highly acclaimed novels, four volumes of poetry, three books of essays, two plays, editor of three major literary anthologies and three legendary literary magazines (Yardbird Reader; Y’Bird, and Quilt), Reed is a veritable one man writing and publishing industry.

Not too shabby for a young black man of working-class origins who dropped out of the University of Buffalo in his junior year in 1960, yet went on to teach at Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of California at Berkeley, and who has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and twice for the National Book Award in poetry and fiction. In spite of this grudging recognition by this country’s literary establishment, Reed was the prime mover behind the founding of the American Book Awards organization to combat the racism and cultural discrimination of these other virtually lily-white institutions. In addition, Reed runs his own publishing firm (wryly called I. Reed Books) and is widely considered one of the major leaders of the now gigantic small press movement in the U.S. over the past 20 years.

So you can see why it is absolutely necessary to talk about a number of Ishmael Reeds. One of them is the writing dynamo whose wildly creative use of what Reed refers to as the Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic is an uproarious and brilliantly satirical take-off on the historical and present-day foibles, fears, dreams, ideas, values, and stupidities that rule Western culture and society. The eternal target of Reed’s critical and parodic assault on what Reed derisively calls the “Western Church” is the received forms and styles of writing from both the (ancient and modern) Western and Afro-American literary traditions. Upon this edifice Reed attacks and deconstructs (demystifies) the metaphysical presuppositions, assumptions, and attitudes inherent in the philosophical structure of Western cultures whose blind and crippling ignorance has led to one-dimensional and oppressive ideas about ‘race,’ ‘sex,’ ‘politics,’ ‘art,’ ‘law,’ ‘morality,’ ‘economics,’ etc., that allows for and creates destructive and exploitive ways of life.

Thus the emblems that Reed satirizes and engages in complex polemics with are Christianity, the hypocrisy and distortion of democratic ideals, the deeply embedded lies concerning American and world history, the absurdly reductive and finally schizophrenic mind-set of the Greco-Roman rationalist tradition, and the resultant horrific attempts to institutionalize/rationalize various forms of slavery, colonialism, and genocide. Lest anyone get the mistaken notion that Reed’s writing is in any way lectern-sleepy it would be wise to guess again. There are very few writers in the world today who could match the brash, sizzling vitality of Reed at his howling, driving best. His is an utterly unique and visionary style that draws on a very wide spectrum of American vernacular forms. In such hilarious and densely complex books as Mumbo Jumbo, The Freelance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Conjure, A Secretary to the Spirits, Flight to Canada, and The Terrible Twos (dig these titles!!), Reed consciously uses the artistic legacy of TV, vaudeville, comic strips, minstrelsy, Jazz, film, painting, journalism, folklore, religious iconography, burlesque, etc., to create and develop his own ‘fictions.’ All techniques are put in the service of a scholarly yet outrageously adventurous mind/spirit intent upon getting us to see/hear/feel/conceive “accepted realities” in completely fresh and new ways. By signifying on what we say is real (about humanity, culture, and art) Reed shows us through the revelatory act of writing that Magic and Science are not, nor have they ever been, mutually exclusive categories. Reed is after no less than a “revolution of the imagination” where the active power of art will not only release us from stale conventions and monolithic experience but give us the intellectual and spiritual energy to transform our lives.

Finally, Reed reminds that any text is open to a multitude of interpretations or “readings” and that all human experience, like art, is open-ended and made intelligible through the processes of creativity and communication. America is not one culture, but multi-cultural. We are what we create (and recreate).

In these days of national amnesia and mindless cynicism where dangerously shallow mythmakers like Reagan rule vicariously through our willful ignorance, meanest fears and smug hatreds, it is crucial to have thinking and compassionate artists like Ishmael Reed around. Great writing not only teaches us to rigorously question what we are “led to believe” but to explore with vigorous honesty and humor the very foundations of our existence. As always, Reed is at the literary cutting edge of what is truly radical and imaginative in American writing today. To paraphrase one of his reviewers, to miss him is to miss out on “one of the great creations of this era.”

[UPDATE: Reed was the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship in 1998. In 2000, a 500-page anthology of his collected work entitled The Reed Reader was published by Basic Books.]

Book Review:

Reckless Eyeballing by Ishmael Reed, St. Martin’s Press, 1986

The Writer As Seer and Modern Oracle
by Kofi Natambu
City Arts Quarterly
Detroit Council of the Arts
Winter, 1987

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:56:34 +0000

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF MICHEL FOUCAULT (b. October 15, 1926—d. June 25, 1984)

Today, October 16, 2026 we feature the foundational ideas, theories, and legacy of the iconic and legendary public intellectual, scholar, historian, philosopher, critical theorist, social and literary critic, and activist Michel Foucault—Part 2

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
Summary by Lee Roy Martin
2022

1 of 3

"Discipline and Punish" (initially published in France in 1975 and in the United States in 1977) by Michel Foucault is a critical examination of the evolution of punishment and the role of prisons in modern society. Foucault explores how societal attitudes toward punishment shifted from public executions and torture to psychological evaluations and incarceration. He argues that this transition reflects deeper social forces and power relations that continue to shape our understanding of crime and punishment. The work is divided into several parts, analyzing the historical context of punishment, the development of disciplinary methods, and the institution of the prison itself.

Foucault emphasizes that modern punishment has moved from physical to psychological forms, suggesting that it targets not just the body of the offender but also their motivations and behaviors. He introduces the concept of "panopticism," illustrating how surveillance and normalization operate within social institutions like prisons and schools, ultimately fostering conformity. Although Foucault critiques the prison system, his inquiry is not merely against imprisonment; rather, he seeks to uncover the underlying structures that perpetuate these systems of control. By examining the interplay between power, knowledge, and societal norms, "Discipline and Punish" invites readers to reflect on the implications of punishment and the mechanisms of social order in contemporary life.

http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html

Excerpted from Discipline & Punish, III.

DISCIPLINE

Chapter 3: Panopticism
by Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

"...Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere: 'A considerable body of militia, commanded by good officers and men of substance', guards at the gates, at the town hall and in every quarter to ensure the prompt obedience of the people and the most absolute authority of the magistrates, 'as also to observe all disorder, theft and extortion'. At each of the town gates there will be an observation post; at the end of each street sentinels. Every day, the intendant visits the quarter in his charge, inquires whether the syndics have carried out their tasks, whether the inhabitants have anything to complain of; they 'observe their actions'. Every day, too, the syndic goes into the street for which he is responsible; stops before each house: gets all the inhabitants to appear at the windows (those who live overlooking the courtyard will be allocated a window looking onto the street at which no one but they may show themselves); he calls each of them by name; informs himself as to the state of each and every one of them - 'in which respect the inhabitants will be compelled to speak the truth under pain of death'; if someone does not appear at the window, the syndic must ask why: 'In this way he will find out easily enough whether dead or sick are being concealed.' Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked - it is the great review of the living and the dead.

This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor At the beginning of the 'lock up', the role of each of the inhabitants present in the town is laid down, one by one; this document bears 'the name, age, sex of everyone, notwithstanding his condition': a copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter, another to the office of the town hall, another to enable the syndic to make his daily roll call. Everything that may be observed during the course of the visits - deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates. The magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they have appointed a physician in charge; no other practitioner may treat, no apothecary prepare medicine, no confessor visit a sick person without having received from him a written note 'to prevent anyone from concealing and dealing with those sick of the contagion, unknown to the magistrates'. The registration of the pathological must be constantly centralized. The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes through the representatives of power, the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on it...

...This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in l which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead - all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear. But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, ''but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his 'true' name, his 'true' place, his 'true' body, his 'true' disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of 'contagions', of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.

If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to a certain extent provided the model for and general form of the great Confinement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power. The leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate; those sick of the plague were caught up in a meticulous tactical partitioning in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects of a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other. The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations. The first is marked; the second analysed and distributed. The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. The plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague. Underlying disciplinary projects the image of the plague stands for all forms of confusion and disorder; just as the image of the leper, cut off from all human contact, underlies projects of exclusion...Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way, etc.)...

Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide - it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.

To begin with, this made it possible - as a negative effect - to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places of confinement, those painted by Goya or described by Howard. Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents. The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of the inmates, by a sequestered and observed solitude (Bentham, 60-64).

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.

It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign's surplus power was manifested are useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants (Bentham, 45). Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him: the curiosity of the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing. The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed. The Panopticon is a marvellous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations. Bentham was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: there were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks; all that was needed was that the separations should be clear and the openings well arranged. The heaviness of the old 'houses of security', with their fortress-like architecture, could be replaced by the simple, economic geometry of a 'house of certainty'. The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side - to the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance...

...So much for the question of observation. But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try out pedagogical experiments - and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans. One would see what would happen when, in their sixteenth or eighteenth year, they were presented with other boys or girls; one could verify whether, as Helvetius thought, anyone could learn anything; one would follow 'the genealogy of every observable idea'; one could bring up different children according to different systems of thought, making certain children believe that two and two do not make four or that the moon is a cheese, then put them together when they are twenty or twenty-five years old; one would then have discussions that would be worth a great deal more than the sermons or lectures on which so much money is spent; one would have at least an opportunity of making discoveries in the domain of metaphysics. The Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them. The Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms. In this central tower, the director may spy on all the employees that he has under his orders: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, warders; he will be able to judge them continuously, alter their behaviour, impose upon them the methods he thinks best; and it will even be possible to observe the director himself. An inspector arriving unexpectedly at the centre of the Panopticon will be able to judge at a glance, without anything being concealed from him, how the entire establishment is functioning. And, in any case, enclosed as he is in the middle of this architectural mechanism, is not the - 5 director's own fate entirely bound up with it? The incompetent physician who has allowed contagion to spread, the incompetent prison governor or workshop manager will be the first victims of an epidemic or a revolt. ' "By every tie I could devise", said the master of the Panopticon, "my own fate had been bound up by me with theirs"' (Bentham, 177). The Panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power. Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's behaviour; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised.

The plague-stricken town, the panoptic establishment - the differences are important. They mark, at a distance of a century and a half, the transformations of the disciplinary programme. In the first case, there is an exceptional situation: against an extraordinary evil, power is mobilized; it makes itself everywhere present and visible; it invents new mechanisms; it separates, it immobilizes, it partitions constructs for a time what is both a counter-city and the perfect society; it imposes an ideal functioning, but one that is reduced, in the final analysis, like the evil that it combats, to a simple dualism of life and death: that which moves brings death, and one kills that which moves. The Panopticon, on the other hand, must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men. No doubt Bentham presents it as a particular institution, closed in upon itself. Utopias, perfectly closed in upon themselves, are common enough. As opposed to the ruined prisons, littered with mechanisms of torture, to be seen in Piranese's engravings, the Panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious cage. The fact that it should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many variations, projected or realized, is evidence of the imaginary intensity that it has possessed for almost two hundred years. But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of l power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.

It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used. It is - necessary modifications apart - applicable 'to all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection' (Bentham, 40; although Bentham takes the penitentiary house as his prime example, it is because it has many different functions to fulfil - safe custody, confinement, solitude, forced labour and instruction).

In each of its applications, it makes it possible to perfect the exercise of power. It does this in several ways: because it can reduce the number of those who exercise it, while increasing the number of those on whom it is exercised. Because it is possible to intervene at any moment and because the constant pressure acts even before the offences, mistakes or crimes have been committed. Because, in these conditions, its strength is that it never intervenes, it is exercised spontaneously and without noise, it constitutes a mechanism whose effects follow from one another. Because, without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on individuals; it gives 'power of mind over mind'. The panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy (in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacity by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms. It is a way of obtaining from power 'in hitherto unexampled quantity', 'a great and new instrument of government . . .; its great excellence consists in the great strength it is capable of giving to any institution it may be thought proper to apply it to' (Bentham, 66).

It's a case of 'it's easy once you've thought of it' in the political sphere. It can in fact be integrated into any function (education, medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the effect of this function, by being linked closely with it; it can constitute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of knowledge) may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the processes that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between 'surplus power' and 'surplus production'. In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations. Bentham's Preface to Panopticon opens with a list of the benefits to be obtained from his 'inspection-house': 'Morals reformed - health preserved - industry invigorated - instruction diffused -public burthens lightened - Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock - the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied - all by a simple idea in architecture!' (Bentham, 39)

Furthermore, the arrangement of this machine is such that its enclosed nature does not preclude a permanent presence from the outside: we have seen that anyone may come and exercise in the central tower the functions of surveillance, and that, this being the case, he can gain a clear idea of the way in which the surveillance is practised. In fact, any panoptic institution, even if it is as rigorously closed as a penitentiary, may without difficulty be subjected to such irregular and constant inspections: and not only by the appointed inspectors, but also by the public; any member of society will have the right to come and see with his own eyes how the schools, hospitals, factories, prisons function. There is no risk, therefore, that the increase of power created by the panoptic machine may degenerate into tyranny; he disciplinary mechanism will be democratically controlled, since it will be constantly accessible 'to the great tribunal committee of the world'. This Panopticon, subtly arranged so that an observer may observe, at a glance, so many different individuals, also enables everyone to come and observe any of the observers. The seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole.

The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function. The plague-stricken town provided an exceptional disciplinary model: perfect, but absolutely violent; to the disease that brought death, power opposed its perpetual threat of death; life inside it was reduced to its simplest expression; it was, against the power of death, the meticulous exercise of the right of the sword. The Panopticon, on the other hand, has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces - to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply.

How is power to be strengthened in such a way that, far from impeding progress, far from weighing upon it with its rules and regulations, it actually facilitates such progress? What intensificator of power will be able at the same time to be a multiplicator of production? How will power, by increasing its forces, be able to increase those of society instead of confiscating them or impeding them? The Panopticon's solution to this problem is that the productive increase of power can be assured only if, on the one hand, it can be exercised continuously in the very foundations of society, in the subtlest possible way, and if, on the other hand, it functions outside these sudden, violent, discontinuous forms that are bound up with the exercise of sovereignty. The body of the king, with its strange material and physical presence, with the force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others, is at the opposite extreme of this new physics of power represented by panopticism; the domain of panopticism is, on the contrary, that whole lower region, that region of irregular bodies, with their details, their multiple movements, their heterogeneous forces, their spatial relations; what are required are mechanisms that analyse distributions, gaps, series, combinations, and which use instruments that render visible, record, differentiate and compare: a physics of a relational and multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations...

...Panopticism is the general principle of a new 'political anatomy' whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline. The celebrated, transparent, circular cage, with its high towers powerful and knowing, may have been for Bentham a project of perfect disciplinary institution; but he also set out to show how one may 'unlock' the disciplines and get them to function in a diffused, multiple, polyvalent way throughout the whole social body. These disciplines~ which the classical age had elaborated in specific, relatively enclosed places - barracks, schools, workshops - and whose total implementation had been imagined only at the limited and temporary scale of a plague-stricken town, Bentham dreamt of transforming into a network of mechanisms that would be everywhere and always alert, running through society without interruption in space or in time. The panoptic arrangement provides the formula for this generalization. It programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms.

There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society.

A whole disciplinary generalization - the Benthamite physics of power represents an acknowledgement of this - had operated throughout the classical age. The spread of disciplinary institutions, whose network was beginning to cover an ever larger surface and occupying above all a less and less marginal position, testifies to this: what was an islet, a privileged place, a circumstantial measure, or a singular model, became a general formula; the regulations characteristic of the Protestant and pious armies of William of Orange or of Gustavus Adolphus were transformed into regulations for all the armies of Europe; the model colleges of the Jesuits, or the schools of Batencour or Demia, following the example set by Sturm, provided the outlines for the general forms of educational discipline; the ordering of the naval and military hospitals provided the model for the entire reorganization of hospitals in the eighteenth century...

...The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals. Hence their emergence from a marginal position on the confines of society, and detachment from the forms of exclusion or expiation, confinement or retreat. Hence the slow loosening of their kinship with religious regularities and enclosures. Hence also their rooting in the most important, most central and most productive sectors of society. They become attached to some of the great essential functions: factory production,~the transmission of knowledge, the diffusion of aptitudes and skills, the war-machine. Hence, too, the double tendency one sees developing throughout the eighteenth century to increase the number of disciplinary institutions and to discipline the existing apparatuses…

...While, on the one hand, the disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms have a certain tendency to become 'de-institutionalized', to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a 'free' state; the massive, compact disciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control, which may be transferred and adapted. Sometimes the closed apparatuses add to their internal and specific function a role of external surveillance, developing around themselves a whole margin of lateral controls. Thus the Christian School must not simply train docile children; it must also make it possible to supervise the parents, to gain information as to their way of life, their resources, their piety, their morals. The school tends to constitute minute social observatories that penetrate even to the adults and exercise regular supervision over them: the bad behaviour of the child, or his absence, is a legitimate pretext, according to Demia, for one to go and question the neighbours, especially if there is any reason to believe that the family will not tell the truth; one can then go and question the parents themselves, to find out whether they know their catechism and the prayers, whether they are determined to root out the vices of their children, how many beds there are in the house and what the sleeping arrangements are; the visit may end with the giving of alms, the present of a religious picture, or the provision of additional beds (Demia, 39-40). Similarly, the hospital is increasingly conceived of as a base for the medical observation of the population outside; after the burning down of the Hotel-Dieu in 1772, there were several demands that the large buildings, so heavy and so disordered, should be replaced by a series of smaller hospitals; their function would be to take in the sick of the quarter, but also to gather information, to be alert to any endemic or epidemic phenomena, to open dispensaries, to give advice to the inhabitants and to keep the authorities informed ,of the sanitary state of the region.

One also sees the spread of disciplinary procedures, not in the form of enclosed institutions, but as centres of observation disseminated throughout society. Religious groups and charity organizations had long played this role of 'disciplining' the population. From the Counter-Reformation to the philanthropy of the July monarchy, initiatives of this type continued to increase; their aims were religious (conversion and moralization), economic (aid and encouragement to work) or political (the struggle against discontent or agitation). One has only to cite by way of example the regulations for the charity associations in the Paris parishes. The territory to be covered was divided into quarters and cantons and the members of the associations divided themselves up along the same lines. These members had to visit their respective areas regularly. 'They will strive to eradicate places of ill-repute, tobacco shops, life-classes, gaming house, public scandals, blasphemy, impiety, and any other disorders that may come to their knowledge.' They will also have to make individual visits to the poor; and the information to be obtained is laid down in regulations: the stability of the lodging, knowledge of prayers, attendance at the sacraments, knowledge of a trade, morality (and 'whether they have not fallen into poverty through their own fault'); lastly, 'one must learn by skilful questioning in what way they behave at home. Whether there is peace between them and their neighbours, whether they are careful to bring up their children in the fear of God . . . whether they do not have their older children of different sexes sleeping together and with them, whether they do not allow licentiousness and cajolery in their families, especially in their older daughters. If one has any doubts as to whether they are married, one must ask to see their marriage certificate'.5

3. The state-control of the mechanisms of discipline. In England, it was private religious groups that carried out, for a long time, the functions of social discipline (cf. Radzinovitz, 203-14); in France, although a part of this role remained in the hands of parish guilds or charity associations, another - and no doubt the most important part - was very soon taken over by the police apparatus.

The organization of a centralized police had long been regarded, even by contemporaries, as the most direct expression of absolutism; the sovereign had wished to have 'his own magistrate to whom he might directly entrust his orders, his commissions, intentions, and who was entrusted with the execution of orders and orders under the King's private seal' (a note by Duval, first secretary at the police magistrature, quoted in Funck-Brentano, 1). In effect, in taking over a number of pre-existing functions - the search for criminals, urban surveillance, economic and political supervision the police magistratures and the magistrature-general that presided over them in Paris transposed them into a single, strict, administrative machine: 'All the radiations of force and information that spread from the circumference culminate in the magistrate-general. . . . It is he who operates all the wheels that together produce order and harmony. The effects of his administration cannot be better compared than to the movement of the celestial bodies' (Des Essarts, 344 and 528).

But, although the police as an institution were certainly organized in the form of a state apparatus, and although this was certainly linked directly to the centre of political sovereignty, the type of power that it exercises, the mechanisms it operates and the elements to which it applies them are specific. It is an apparatus that must be coextensive with the entire social body_and not only by the extreme limits that it embraces, but by the minuteness of the details it is concerned with. Police power must bear 'over everything': it is not however the totality of the state nor of the kingdom as visible and invisible body of the monarch; it is the dust of events, actions, behaviour, opinions - 'everything that happens';' the police are concerned with 'those things of every moment', those 'unimportant things', of which Catherine II spoke in her Great Instruction (Supplement to the Instruction for the drawing up of a new code, 1769, article 535). With the police, one is in the indefinite world of a supervision that seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle, the most passing phenomenon of the social body: 'The ministry of the magistrates and police officers is of the greatest importance; the objects that it embraces are in a sense definite, one may perceive them only by a sufficiently detailed examination' (Delamare, unnumbered Preface): the infinitely small of political power.

And, in order to be exercised, this power had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network which, according to Le Maire, comprised for Paris the forty-eight commissaires, the twenty inspecteurs, then the 'observers', who were paid regularly, the 'basses mouches', or secret agents, who were paid by the day, then the informers, paid according to the job done, and finally the prostitutes. And this unceasing observation had to be accumulated in a series of reports and registers; throughout the eighteenth century, an immense police text increasingly covered society by means of a complex documentary organization (on the police registers in the eighteenth century, cf. Chassaigne). And, unlike the methods of judicial or administrative writing, what was registered in this way were forms of behaviour, attitudes, possibilities, suspicions - a permanent account of individuals' behaviour.

Now, it should be noted that, although this police supervision was entirely 'in the hands of the king', it did not function in a single direction. It was in fact a double-entry system: it had to correspond, by manipulating the machinery of justice, to the immediate wishes of the king, but it was also capable of responding to solicitations from below; the celebrated lettres de cachet, or orders under the king's private seal, which were long the symbol of arbitrary royal rule and which brought detention into disrepute on political grounds, were in fact demanded by families, masters, local notables, neighbours, parish priests; and their function was to punish by confinement a whole infra-penality, that of disorder, agitation, disobedience, bad conduct; those things that Ledoux wanted to exclude from his architecturally perfect city and which he called 'offences of non-surveillance'. In short, the eighteenth-century police added a disciplinary function to its role as the auxiliary of justice in the pursuit of criminals and as an instrument for the political supervision of plots, opposition movements or revolts. It was a complex function since it linked the absolute power of the monarch to the lowest levels of power disseminated in society; since, between these different, enclosed institutions of discipline (workshops, armies, schools), it extended an intermediary network, acting where they could not intervene, disciplining the non-disciplinary spaces; but it filled in the gaps, linked them together, guaranteed with its armed force an interstitial discipline and a meta-discipline. 'By means of a wise police, the sovereign accustoms the people to order and obedience' (Vattel, 162).

The organization of the police apparatus in the eighteenth century sanctioned a generalization of the disciplines that became co-extensive with the state itself. Although it was linked in the most explicit way with everything in the royal power that exceeded the exercise of regular justice, it is understandable why the police offered such slight resistance to the rearrangement of the judicial power; and why it has not ceased to impose its prerogatives upon it, with everincreasing weight, right up to the present day; this is no doubt because it is the secular arm of the judiciary; but it is also because to a far greater degree than the judicial institution, it is identified, by reason of its extent and mechanisms, with a society of the disciplinary type. Yet it would be wrong to believe that the disciplinary functions were confiscated and absorbed once and for all by a state apparatus.

'Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology. And it may be taken over either by 'specialized' institutions (the penitentiaries or 'houses of correction' of the nineteenth century), or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by pre-existing authorities that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of power (one day we should show how intra-familial relations, essentially in the parents-children cell, have become 'disciplined', absorbing since the classical age external schemata, first educational and military, then medical, psychiatric, psychological, which have made the family the privileged locus of emergence for the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal); or by apparatuses that have made discipline their principle of internal functioning (the disciplinarization of the administrative apparatus from the Napoleonic period), or finally by state apparatuses whose major, if not exclusive, function is to assure that discipline reigns over society as a whole (the police).

On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social 'quarantine', to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of 'panopticism'. Not because the disciplinary modality of power has replaced all the others; but because it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together, extending them and above all making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements. It assures an infinitesimal distribution of the power relations.

A few years after Bentham, Julius gave this society its birth certificate (Julius, 384-6). Speaking of the panoptic principle, he said that there was much more there than architectural ingenuity: it was an event in the 'history of the human mind'. In appearance, it is merely the solution of a technical problem; but, through it, a whole type of society emerges. Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle. 'To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection of a small number of objects': this was the problem to which the architecture of temples, theatres and circuses responded. With spectacle, there was a predominance of public life, the intensity of festivals, sensual proximity. In these rituals in which blood flowed, society found new vigour and formed for a moment a single great body. The modern age poses the opposite problem: 'To procure for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a great multitude.' In a society in which the principal elements are no longer the community and public life, but, on the one hand, private individuals and, on the other, the state, relations can be regulated only in a form that is the exact reverse of the spectacle: 'It was to the modern age, to the ever-growing influence of the state, to its ever more profound intervention in all the details and all the relations of social life, that was reserved the task of increaSing and perfecting its guarantees, by using and directing towards that great aim the building and distribution of buildings intended to observe a great multitude of men at the same time.'

Julius saw as a fulfilled historical process that which Bentham had described as a technical programme. Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; tbe circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power2 which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism. The importance, in historical mythology, of the Napoleonic character probably derives from the fact that it is at the point of junction of the monarchical, ritual exercise of sovereignty and the hierarchical, permanent exercise of indefinite discipline. He is the individual who looms over everything with a single gaze which no detail, however minute, can escape: 'You may consider that no part of the Empire is without surveillance, no crime, no offence, no contravention that remains unpunished, and that the eye of the genius who can enlighten all embraces the whole of this vast machine, without, however, the slightest detail escaping his attention' (Treilhard, 14). At the moment of its full blossoming, the disciplinary society still assumes with the Emperor the old aspect of the power of spectacle. As a monarch who is at one and the same time a usurper of the ancient throne and the organizer of the new state, he combined into a single symbolic, ultimate figure the whole of the long process by which the pomp of sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations of power, were extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism in which the vigilance of intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and the sun.

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: Excerpt from speech given by Huey P. Newton at Boston College on November 18, 1970. The Black Panther Party Was Co-founded 60 Years Ago on October 15, 1966 by Bobby Seale (b. 1936) and Huey P. Newton (1942-1989) in Oakland, California--PART 3

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 22:51:25 +0000

“What’s Past is Prologue…"

All,

NOTE: The following excerpted text is taken from an important and even historically groundbreaking speech by Huey P. Newton that was given at Boston College on November 18, 1970 when Newton was only 28 years old. He had been released three months earlier on August 5, 1970 after spending nearly three years in prison and was in the midst of an intense social, intellectual and institutional reorganization and political reorientation of the then four year old Black Panther Party. The new theoretical and ideological construct that Newton originated and advanced in the following speech is known as intercommunalism.

Kofi

HUEY P. NEWTON SPEAKING AT BOSTON COLLEGE, NOVEMBER 18, 1970

“...In 1966 we called our Party a Black Nationalist Party. We called ourselves Black Nationalists because we thought that nationhood was the answer. Shortly after that we decided that what was really needed was revolutionary nationalism, that is, nationalism plus socialism. After analyzing conditions a little more, we found that it was impractical and even contradictory. Therefore, we went to a higher level of consciousness. We saw that in order to be free we had to crush the ruling circle and therefore we had to unite with the peoples of the world. So we called ourselves Internationalists. We sought solidarity with the peoples of the world. We sought solidarity with what we thought were the nations of the world. But then what happened? We found that because everything is in a constant state of transformation, because of the development of technology, because of the development of the mass media, because of the fire power of the imperialist, and because of the fact that the United States is no longer a nation but an empire, nations could not exist, for they did not have the criteria for nationhood. Their self-determination, economic determination, and cultural determination has been transformed by the imperialists and the ruling circle. They were no longer nations. We found that in order to be Internationalists we had to be also Nationalists, or at least acknowledge nationhood. Internationalism, if I understand the word, means the interrelationship among a group of nations. But since no nation exists, and since the United States is in fact an empire, it is impossible for us to be Internationalists. These transformations and phenomena require us to call ourselves “intercommunalists” because nations have been transformed into communities of the world. The Black Panther Party now disclaims internationalism and supports intercommunalism.

Marx and Lenin felt, with the information they had, that when the non-state finally came to be a reality, it would be caused or ushered in by the people and by communism. A strange thing happened. The ruling reactionary circle, through the consequence of being imperialists, transformed the world into what we call “Reactionary Intercommunalism.” They laid siege upon all the communities of the world, dominating the institutions to such an extent that the people were not served by the institutions in their own land. The Black Panther Party would like to reverse that trend and lead the people of the world into the age of “Revolutionary Intercommunalism.”This would be the time when the people seize the means of production and distribute the wealth and the technology in an egalitarian way to the many communities of the world.

We see very little difference in what happens to a community here in North America and what happens to a community in Vietnam. We see very little difference in what happens, even culturally, to a Chinese community in San Francisco and a Chinese community in Hong Kong. We see very little difference in what happens to a Black community in Harlem and a Black community in South America, a Black community in Angola and one in Mozambique. We see very little difference... In other words, if technology and the ruling circle go on as they are now the people of the world will be conditioned to adopt Western values. (I think Japan is a good example.) The differences between people are getting very small, but again that is in the interest of the ruling circle. I do not believe that history can be backtracked. If the world is really that interconnected then we have to acknowledge that and say that in order for the people to be free, they will have to control the institutions of their community, and have some form of representation in the technological center that they have produced. The United States, in order to correct its robbery of the world, will have to first return much of which it has stolen. I don’t see how we can talk about socialism when the problem is world distribution. I think this is what Marx meant when he talked about the non-state.

I was at Alex Haley’s house some time ago and he talked to me about his search for his past. He found it in Africa but when he returned there shortly afterward, he was in a state of panic. His village hadn’t changed very much, but when he went there he saw an old man walking down the road, holding something that he cherished to his car. It was a small transistor radio that was zeroed in on the British broadcasting network. What I’m trying to say is that mass media plus the development of transportation make it impossible for us to think of ourselves in terms of separate entities, as nations. Do you realize that it only took me approximately five hours to get from San Francisco to here? It only takes ten hours to get from here to Vietnam. The ruling circle no longer even acknowledges wars; they call them “police actions.” They call the riots of the Vietnamese people “domestic disturbance.” What I am saying is that the ruling circle must realize and accept the consequences of what they have done. They know that there is only one world, but they are determined to follow the logic of their exploitation…"
--HUEY P. NEWTON (1942-1989), Speech at Boston College, November 18, 1970

Power to the people, brothers and sisters. I would like to thank you for my presence here tonight because you are responsible for it. I would be in a maximum-security penitentiary if it were not for the power of the people.

Chairman, for Ericka Huggins, for Angela Davis, for the New York 21 and the Soledad Brothers. For all political prisoners and prisoners of war. On the 28th and 29th of November we will have a People’s Revolutionary Constitutional convention in Washington, D.C. We cannot have that convention if the people do not come. After all, the people are the makers of world history and responsible for everything.

How can we have a convention if we have no people? Some believe a people’s convention is possible without the people being there. As I recall, that was the case in 1777.

Tonight, I would like to outline for you the Black Panther Party’s program and explain how we arrived at our ideological position and why we feel it necessary to institute a Ten-Point Program. A Ten-Point Program is not revolutionary in itself, nor is it reformist. It is a survival program. We, the people, are threatened with genocide because racism and fascism are rampant in this country and throughout the world. And the ruling circle in North America is responsible. We intend to change all of that, and in order to change it, there must be a total transformation. But until we can achieve that total transformation, we must exist. In order to exist, we must survive; therefore, we need a survival kit: the Ten-Point Program. It is necessary for our children to grow up healthy with functional and creative minds. They cannot do this if they do not get the correct nutrition. That is why we have a breakfast program for children. We also have community health programs. We have a busing program. We call it “The Bus for Relatives and Parents of Prisoners,” We realize that the fascist regime that operates the prisons throughout America would like to do their treachery in the dark. But if we get the relatives, parents, and friends to the prisons they can expose the treachery of the fascists. This too is a survival program.

We must not regard our survival programs as an answer to the whole problem of oppression. We don’t even claim it to be a revolutionary program. Revolutions are made of sterner stuff. We do say that if the people are not here revolution cannot be achieved, for the people and only the people make revolutions.

The theme of our Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention is “Survival Through Service to the People.” At our convention we will present our total survival program. It is a program that works very much like the first-aid kit that is used when a plane falls and you find yourself in the middle of the sea on a rubber raft. You need a few things to last until you can get to the shore, until you can get to that oasis where you can be happy and healthy. If you do not have the things necessary to get you to that shore, then you will probably not exist. At this time the ruling circle threatens us to the extent that we are afraid that we might not exist to see the next day or see the revolution. The Black Panther Party will not accept the total destruction of the people. As a matter of fact, we have drawn a line of demarcation and we will no longer tolerate fascism, aggression, brutality, and murder of any kind. We will not sit around and allow ourselves to be murdered. Each person has an obligation to preserve himself. If he does not preserve himself then I accuse him of suicide: reactionary suicide because reactionary conditions will have caused his death. If we do nothing we are accepting the situation and allowing ourselves to die. We will not accept that. If the alternatives are very narrow we still will not sit around, we will not die the death of the Jews in Germany. We would rather die the death of the Jews in Warsaw!

Where there is courage, where there is self-respect and dignity, there is a possibility that we can change the conditions and win. This is is a possibility that we can change the conditions and win. This is called /revolutionary enthusiasm/ and it is the kind of struggle that is needed in order to guarantee a victory. If we must die, then we will die the death of a revolutionary suicide that says, “If I am put down, if I am driven out, I refuse to be swept out with a broom. I would much rather be driven out with a stick because if I am swept out with the broom it will humiliate me and I will lose my self-respect. But if I am driven out with the stick, then, at least, I can claim the dignity of a man and die the death of a man rather than the death of a dog.”

Of course, our real desire is to live, but we will not be cowed, we will not be intimidated.

I would like to explain to you the method that the Black Panther Party used to arrive at our ideological position, and more than that, I would like to give to you a framework or a process of thinking that might help us solve the problems and the contradictions that exist today. Before we approach the problem we must get a clear picture of what is really going on; a clear image divorced from the attitudes and emotions that we usually project into a situation. We must be as objective as possible without accepting dogma, letting the facts speak for themselves. But we will not remain totally objective; we will become subjective in the application of the knowledge received from the external world. We will use the scientific method to acquire this knowledge, but we will openly acknowledge our ultimate subjectivity. Once we apply knowledge in order to will a certain outcome our objectivity ends and our subjectivity begins. We call this integrating theory with practice, and this is what the Black Panther Party is all about...

...In order to understand a group of forces operating at the same time, science developed what is called the scientific method. One of the characteristics or properties of this method is disinterest. Not uninterest, but disinterest: no special interest in the outcome. In other words, the scientist does not promote an outcome, he just collects the facts. Nevertheless, in acquiring his facts he must begin with a basic premise. Most basic premises stem from a set of assumptions because it is very difficult to test a first premise without these assumptions. After an agreement is reached on certain assumptions, an intelligent argument can follow, for then logic and consistency arc all that is required to reach a valid conclusion.

Tonight I ask you to assume that an external world exists. An external world that exists independently of us. The second assumption I would like for you to make is that things are in a constant state of change, transformation, or flux. With agreement on these two assumptions we can go on with our discussion.

The scientific method relies heavily on empiricism. But the problem with empiricism is that it tells you very little about the future; it tells you only about the past, about information which you have already discovered through observation and experience. It always refers to past experience.

Long after the rules of empirical knowledge had been ascertained, a man by the name of Karl Marx integrated these rules with a theory developed by Immanuel Kant called rationale. Kant called his process of reasoning pure reason because it did not depend on the external world. Instead it only depended on consistency in manipulating symbols in order to come up with a conclusion based upon reason. For example, in this sentence “If the sky is above my head when I turn my head upwards, I will see the sky” there is nothing wrong with the conclusion. As a matter of fact, it is accurate. But I haven’t said anything about the existence of the sky. I said “if” With rationale we are not dependent upon the external world. With empiricism we can tell very little about the future. So what will we do? What Marx did. In order to understand what was happening in the world Marx found it necessary to integrate rationale with empiricism. He called his concept dialectical materialism. If, like Marx, we integrate these two concepts or these two ways of thinking, not only are we in touch with the world outside us but we can also explain the constant state of transformation. Therefore, we can also make some predictions about the outcome of certain social phenomena that is not only in constant change but also in conflict.

Marx, as a social scientist, criticized other social scientists for attempting to explain phenomena, or one phenomenon, by taking it out of its environment, isolating it, putting it into a category, and not acknowledging the fact that once it was taken out of its environment the phenomenon was transformed. For example, if in a discipline such as sociology we study the activity of groups – how they hold together and why they fall apart – without understanding everything else related to that group, we may arrive at a false conclusion about the nature of the group. What Marx attempted to do was to develop a way of thinking that would explain phenomena realistically.

When atoms collide, in physics, they divide into electrons, protons, and neutrons, if I remember correctly. What happened to the atom? It was transformed. In the social world a similar thing happens. We can apply the same principle. When two cultures collide a process or condition occurs which the sociologists call acculturation: the modification of cultures as a result of their contact with each other. Marx called the collision of social forces or classes a contradiction. In the physical world, when forces collide we sometimes call it just that — a collision. For example, when two cars meet head on, trying to occupy the same space at the same time, both are transformed. Sometimes other things happen. Had those two cars been turned back to back and sped off in opposite directions they would not be a contradiction; they would be contrary, covering different spaces at different times. Sometimes when people meet they argue and misunderstand each other because they think they are having a contradiction when they are only being contrary. For example, I can say the wall is ten feet tall and you can say the wall is red, and we can argue all day thinking we are having a contradiction when actually we are only being contrary. When people argue, when one offers a thesis and the other offers an anti -thesis, we say there is a contradiction and hope that if we argue long enough, provided that we agree on one premise, we can have some kind of synthesis. Tonight I hope I can have some form of agreement or synthesis with those who have criticized the Black Panther Party.

I think that the mistake is that some people have taken the apparent as the actual fact in spite of their claims of scholarly research and following the discipline of dialectical materialism. They fail to search deeper, as the scientist is required to do, to get beyond the apparent and come up with the more significant. Let me explain how this relates to the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party is a Marxist-Leninist party because we follow the dialectical method and we also integrate theory with practice. We are not mechanical Marxists and we are not historical materialists. Some people think they are Marxists when actually they are following the thoughts of Hegel. Some people think they are Marxist-Leninists but they refuse to be creative, and are, therefore, tied to the past. They are tied to a rhetoric that does not apply to the present set of conditions. They are tied to a set of thoughts that approaches dogma – what we call flunkeyism.

Marx attempted to set up a framework which could be applied to a number of conditions. And in applying this framework we cannot be afraid of the outcome because things change and we must be willing to acknowledge that change because we arc objective. If we are using the method of dialectical materialism we don’t expect to find anything the same even one minute later because “one minute later” is history. If things are in a constant state of change, we cannot expect them to be the same. Words used to describe old phenomena may be useless to describe the new. And if we use the old words to describe new events we run the risk of confusing people and misleading them into thinking that things are static...

...The United States, or what I like to call North America, was transformed at the hands of the ruling circle from a nation to an empire. This caused a total change in the world, because no part of an interrelated thing can change and leave everything else the same. So when the United States, or North America, became an empire it changed the whole composition of the world. There were other nations in the world. But “empire” means that the ruling circle who lives in the empire (the imperialists) control other nations. Now some time ago there existed a phenomenon we called-well, I call – primitive empire. An example of that would be the Roman Empire because the Romans controlled all of what was thought to be the known world. In fact they did not know all of the world, therefore some nations still existed independent of it. Now, probably all of the world is known. The United States as an empire necessarily controls the whole world either directly or indirectly.

If we understand dialectics we know that every determination brings about a limitation and every limitation brings about a determination. In other words, while one force may give rise to one thing it might crush other things, including itself. We might call this concept “the negation of the negation.” So, while in 1917 the ruling circle created an industrial base and used the system of capitalism they were also creating the necessary conditions for socialism. They were doing this because in a socialist society it is necessary to have some centralization of the wealth, some equal distribution of the wealth, and some harmony among the people.

Now, I will give you roughly some characteristics that any people who call themselves a nation should have. These are economic independence, cultural determination, control of the political institutions, territorial integrity, and safety.

In 1966 we called our Party a Black Nationalist Party. We called ourselves Black Nationalists because we thought that nationhood was the answer. Shortly after that we decided that what was really needed was revolutionary nationalism, that is, nationalism plus socialism. After analyzing conditions a little more, we found that it was impractical and even contradictory. Therefore, we went to a higher level of consciousness. We saw that in order to be free we had to crush the ruling circle and therefore we had to unite with the peoples of the world. So we called ourselves Internationalists. We sought solidarity with the peoples of the world. We sought solidarity with what we thought were the nations of the world. But then what happened? We found that because everything is in a constant state of transformation, because of the development of technology, because of the development of the mass media, because of the fire power of the imperialist, and because of the fact that the United States is no longer a nation but an empire, nations could not exist, for they did not have the criteria for nationhood. Their self-determination, economic determination, and cultural determination has been transformed by the imperialists and the ruling circle. They were no longer nations. We found that in order to be Internationalists we had to be also Nationalists, or at least acknowledge nationhood. Internationalism, if I understand the word, means the interrelationship among a group of nations. But since no nation exists, and since the United States is in fact an empire, it is impossible for us to be Internationalists. These transformations and phenomena require us to call ourselves “intercommunalists” because nations have been transformed into communities of the world. The Black Panther Party now disclaims internationalism and supports intercommunalism.

Marx and Lenin felt, with the information they had, that when the non-state finally came to be a reality, it would be caused or ushered in by the people and by communism. A strange thing happened. The ruling reactionary circle, through the consequence of being imperialists, transformed the world into what we call “Reactionary Intercommunalism.” They laid siege upon all the communities of the world, dominating the institutions to such an extent that the people were not served by the institutions in their own land. The Black Panther Party would like to reverse that trend and lead the people of the world into the age of “Revolutionary Intercommunalism.”This would be the time when the people seize the means of production and distribute the wealth and the technology in an egalitarian way to the many communities of the world.

We see very little difference in what happens to a community here in North America and what happens to a community in Vietnam. We see very little difference in what happens, even culturally, to a Chinese community in San Francisco and a Chinese community in Hong Kong. We see very little difference in what happens to a Black community in Harlem and a Black community in South America, a Black community in Angola and one in Mozambique. We see very little difference.

So, what has actually happened, is that the non-state has already been accomplished, but it is reactionary. A community by way of definition is a comprehensive collection of institutions that serve the people who live there. It differs from a nation because a community evolves around a greater structure that we usually call the state, and the state has certain control over the community if the administration represents the people or if the administration happens to be the people’s commissar. It is not so at this time, so there’s still something to be done. I mentioned earlier the “negation of the negation,” I mentioned earlier the necessity for the redistribution of wealth. We think that it is very important to know that as things are in the world today socialism in the United States will never exist. Why? It will not exist because it cannot exist. It cannot at this time exist anyplace in the world. Socialism would require a socialist state, and if a state does not exist how could socialism exist? So how do we define certain progressive countries such as the People’s Republic of China? How do we describe certain progressive countries, or communities as we call them, as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea? How do we define certain communities such as North Vietnam and the provisional government in the South? How do we explain these communities if in fact they too cannot claim nationhood? We say this: we say they represent the people’s liberated territory. They represent a community liberated. But that community is not sufficient, it is not satisfied, just as the National Liberation Front is not satisfied with the liberated territory in the South. It is only the groundwork and preparation for the liberation of the world-seizing the wealth from the ruling circle, equal distribution and proportional representation in an intercommunal framework. This is what the Black Panther Party would like to achieve with the help of the power of the people, because without the people nothing can be achieved.

I stated that in the United States socialism would never exist. In order for a revolution to occur in the United States you would have to have a redistribution of wealth not on a national or an international level, but on an intercommunal level. Because how can we say that we have accomplished revolution if we redistribute the wealth just to the people here in North America when the ruling circle itself is guilty of trespass /de bonis asportatis/. That is, they have taken away the goods of the people of the world, transported them to America and used them as their very own.

In 1917, when the revolution occurred, there could be a redistribution of wealth on a national level because nations existed. Now, if you talk in terms of planning an economy on a world-wide level, on an intercommunal level, you are saying something important: that the people have been ripped off very much like one country being ripped off. Simple reparation is not enough because the people have not only been robbed of their raw materials, but of the wealth accrued from the investment of those materials-an investment which has created the technological machine. The people of the world will have to have control – not a limited share of control for “X” amount of time, but total control forever.

In order to plan a real intercommunal economy we will have to acknowledge how the world is hooked up. We will also have to acknowledge that nations have not existed for some time. Some people will argue that nations still exist because of the cultural differences. By way of definition, just for practical argument, culture is a collection of learned patterns of behavior. Here in the United States Black people, Africans, were raped from the mother country, and consequently we have literally lost most of our African values. Perhaps we still hold on to some surviving Africanisms, but by and large you can see the transformation which was achieved by time and the highly technological society whose tremendous mass media functions as an indoctrination center. The ruling circle has launched satellites in order to project a beam across the earth and indoctrinate the world, and while there might be some cultural differences, these differences are not qualitative but quantitative. In other words, if technology and the ruling circle go on as they are now the people of the world will be conditioned to adopt Western values. (I think Japan is a good example.) The differences between people are getting very small, but again that is in the interest of the ruling circle. I do not believe that history can be backtracked. If the world is really that interconnected then we have to acknowledge that and say that in order for the people to be free, they will have to control the institutions of their community, and have some form of representation in the technological center that they have produced. The United States, in order to correct its robbery of the world, will have to first return much of which it has stolen. I don’t see how we can talk about socialism when the problem is world distribution. I think this is what Marx meant when he talked about the non-state.

I was at Alex Haley’s house some time ago and he talked to me about his search for his past. He found it in Africa but when he returned there shortly afterward, he was in a state of panic. His village hadn’t changed very much, but when he went there he saw an old man walking down the road, holding something that he cherished to his car. It was a small transistor radio that was zeroed in on the British broadcasting network. What I’m trying to say is that mass media plus the development of transportation make it impossible for us to think of ourselves in terms of separate entities, as nations. Do you realize that it only took me approximately five hours to get from San Francisco to here? It only takes ten hours to get from here to Vietnam. The ruling circle no longer even acknowledges wars; they call them “police actions.” They call the riots of the Vietnamese people “domestic disturbance.” What I am saying is that the ruling circle must realize and accept the consequences of what they have done. They know that there is only one world, but they are determined to follow the logic of their exploitation.

A short time ago in Detroit, the community was under siege, and now sixteen members of the Party arc in prison. The local police laid siege on that community and that house, and they used the same weapons they use in Vietnam (as a matter of fact, two tanks rolled up). The same thing happens in Vietnam because the “police” are there also. The “police” are everywhere and they all wear the same uniform and use the same tools, and have the same purpose: the protection of the ruling circle here in North America. It is true that the world is one community, but we are not satisfied with the concentration of its power. We want the power for the people.

I said earlier (but I strayed away) that the theory of the “negation of the negation” is valid. Some scholars have been wondering why in Asia, Africa, and Latin America the resistance always seeks the goal of a collective society. They seem not to institute the economy of the capitalist. They seem to jump all the way from feudalism to a collective society, and some people can’t understand why. Why won’t they follow historical Marxism, or historical materialism? Why won’t they go from feudalism to the development of a capitalistic base and finally to socialism? They don’t do it because they can’t do it. They don’t do it for the same reason that the Black community in Harlem cannot develop capitalism, that the Black community in Oakland or San Francisco cannot develop capitalism, because the imperialists have already pre-empted the field. They have already centralized the wealth. Therefore, in order to deal with them all we can do is liberate our community and then move on them as a collective force.

We’ve had long arguments with people about our convictions. Before we became conscious we used to call ourselves a dispersed collection of colonies here in North America. And people argued with me all day and all night, asking, “How can you possibly be a colony? In order to be a colony you have to have a nation, and you’re not a nation, you’re a community. You’re a dispersed collection of communities.” Because the Black Panther Party is not embarrassed to change or admit error, tonight I would like to accept the criticism and say that those critics were absolutely right. We are a collection of communities just as the Korean people, the Vietnamese people, and the Chinese people arc a collection of communities-a dispersed collection of communities because we have no superstructure of our own. The superstructure we have is the superstructure of Wall Street, which all of our labor produced. This is a distorted form of collectivity. Everything’s been collected but it’s used exclusively in the interest of the ruling circle. This is why the Black Panther Party denounces Black capitalism and says that all we can do is liberate our community, not only in Vietnam but here, not only in Cambodia and the People’s Republics of China and Korea but the communities of the world. We must unite as one community and then transform the world into a place where people will be happy, wars will end, the state itself will no longer exist, and we will have communism. But we cannot do this right away. When transformation takes place, when structural change takes place, the result is usually cultural lag. After the people possess the means of production we will probably not move directly into communism but linger with Revolutionary Intercommunalism until such time as we can wash away bourgeois thought, until such time as we can wash away racism and reactionary thinking, until such time as people are not attached to their nation as a peasant is attached to the soil, until such time as that people can gain their sanity and develop a culture that is “essentially human,” that will serve the people instead of some god. Because we cannot avoid contact with each other we will have to develop a value system that will help us function together in harmony...

HISTORICAL UPDATE: November 21, 2021

"What's Past is Prologue..."

www.hueypnewtonfoundation.org

Friends,

The lack of justice in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial reminds us of how urgent transforming this nation is. We live in a country where a white man can pick up a gun, shoot three people protesting in support of black lives, and murder two without consequence.

It isn't any different from the people who killed Emmitt Till, Bobby Hutton, Trayvon Martin, or Sandra Bland. The United States has a justice system that upholds White Supremacy, whether white murderers are a part of law enforcement or not. This system - our system - has allowed black people and those who fight for us to be taken from us in plain sight.

When the Black Panther Party was founded in 1966, they imagined an entirely different world than the one they lived in because they knew capitalist and white supremacist institutions could not be reformed -- those systems had to be abolished and society had to be reimagined. Dr. Huey P. Newton was tried in court almost 100 times on false charges, yet Kyle Rittenhouse, for whom there is video evidence of shooting protestors, is free to realize his destiny.

There are hundreds of paradoxes in the criminal justice system that prove that it is unjust, racist, and capitalist. It is time to imagine a new world and start building it immediately.

That's why we promote public art that promotes critical thinking and social justice. That's why we create educational tools that teach the true history of the Black Panther Party. That's why our work is more relevant now than ever.

All Power to the People,

Fredrika Newton, Co-Founder & President
Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: Intercommunalism: The Late Theorizations of Huey P. Newton, ‘Chief Theoretician’ of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party Was Co-founded 60 Years Ago on October 15, 1966 by Bobby Seale (b. 1936) and Huey P. Newton (1942-1989) in Oakland, California.

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 22:17:25 +0000

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/06/11/intercommunalism-the-late-theorizations-of-huey-p-newton-chief-theoretician-of-the-black-panther-party/

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Intercommunalism: The Late Theorizations of Huey P. Newton, ‘Chief Theoretician’ of the Black Panther Party

by Delio Vasquez
June 11, 2018
PDF

On September 5, 1970, Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party (BPP), introduced his theory of intercommunalism at the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. 1 He later expanded on this theory before an audience at Boston College in November of that year, and then again In February 1971 during a joint talk he gave with psychologist Erik Erikson across several days at Yale University and later in Oakland. 2 Newton’s opening remarks at Yale lasted over an hour but were reduced to about ten pages in the subsequently published In Search of Common Ground. 3 As a philosophical foundation for his remarks on intercommunalism, that introductory speech included an engagement with the work of Hegel, Marx, Freud, Jung, Kant, Pierce, and James, among others. 4 Portions of the material of this main speech, the subsequent Q&A, and other writings of Newton’s were later combined, recomposed, and expanded upon under the title of “Intercommunalism” in 1974, the same year that he completed his bachelor’s degree and fled temporarily to Cuba. This text had until now been available only through access to the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection (1968-1994), held in archive in Stanford University’s Special Collections. 5 It is now reproduced here, available to the public at large for the first time, accompanied by this introduction.

***

“The logic of the thesis of intercommunalism is: imperialism leads to ‘reactionary intercommunalism’ to ‘revolutionary intercommunalism’ to pure communism and anarchy. Each of the concepts is in need of definition and redefinition.” 6

The Black Panther Party was the last and perhaps most significant, domestically-based left revolutionary political organization to challenge American imperialism. At its height, the BPP encompassed 68 chapters in the United States, it established an international branch in Algeria and trained with operatives in the Congo, and it formed coalitions with political organizations in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, North and South Vietnam, North Korea, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, India, Uruguay, Peru, Nicaragua, Cuba, Palestine, Iraq, Israel, Australia, and throughout Europe. 7 Ultimately, the Black Panther Party’s influence and power provoked a frenzied effort by the U.S. federal government and local law enforcement to destroy its structure and either assassinate or immobilize its members—an effort that continues to the present day, with dozens of former Panthers still incarcerated. 8

Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the BPP with Bobby Seale, was raised in poverty in Oakland and attended Oakland public schools. He later described his schooling as a humiliating experience that eliminated any confidence he had in his own ability to learn, leaving him with feelings of “despair and futility.” “We not only accepted ourselves as inferior; we accepted the inferiority as inevitable and inescapable.” 9 After graduating high school, he finally gained functional literacy at age 17 through the memorization of poetry and by reading Plato’s Republic several times consecutively. 10 He then threw himself into the study of ancient, early modern and modern philosophy; Enlightenment Era, Marxist, Third World and Black Radical political theory; foundational sociology, psychology, and positivist philosophy; and modern European, American, and Black literature. 11 During the existence of the BPP, Newton was the party’s primary political strategist and tactician, responsible for both the early armed patrols of Oakland police which he conducted with shotgun and lawbook in hand and for the diplomatic envoy made to Premier Zhou Enlai of the People’s Republic of China in 1971.

Newton developed his theory of intercommunalism in the fall of 1970, two months after his release from solitary confinement, penned in response to his deep disappointment with the backlash from the Black community following the BPP’s pledge to offer troops in support of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. 13 Many simply could not grasp what the liberation of Black people could possibly have to do with the Vietnamese Communists against whom the U.S. was waging war. The theory of intercommunalism was Newton’s attempt to lay out a political and economic account of how he understood the world to be structured at the time—under a new type of imperialism—but it was also his attempt at forming a political strategy for how the BPP could expect to move forward in the decades to come as the revolution advanced. According to Newton’s own admission, the theory of intercommunalism nonetheless proved perplexing and difficult for most, though it is now clear that this was more an effect of the counterintuitive character of what he was arguing rather than how he argued it, as Newton’s writing style reads as refreshingly clear compared to much other leftist writing of the period. 14

He was able to expand on his theorizations later while completing his PhD in the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, an interdisciplinary department for philosophy, cultural theory, and political theory. Indeed, from 1972 through about 1980, Newton worked on a wide range of theoretical problems, including a series of studies into the global “decentralization of production” and the feasibility of revolutionary expropriations in “The Technology Question” and “Technology vs. Land.” He accumulated writings and annotations on anthropology, evolutionary biology, and human psychology for a “Proposed Book on Deceit and Self Deception” that never came to fruition, though he would later publish a related article in collaboration with evolutionary biologist Dr. Robert Trivers for Science Digest in 1982. 15 Among his most philosophical writings are included: a metaphysical inquiry into the possibility of a utopian politics drawing from dialectics, psychoanalysis, and intercommunalism in “Utopia: Universal Life Energy”; a sprawling engagement with mind-body dualism in “The Mind is Flesh”; and a speculative psychoanalytic essay on gendered domination in “Eve, the Mother of all Living.” 16 In the late 1970s, he also produced a critique of theological approaches to history grounded in a reading of the epic of Gilgamesh entitled “The First Hero of Literature,” a materialist historicization of early Christian history presumably for use in relation to the BPP’s late ‘70s Black community-oriented “Son of Man” Temple, and other writings on political theology, as with the aptly titled “Politics and Myth.” 17

Regrettably, Newton’s intellectual productivity both during and after the height of the BPP has too often been dismissed out of hand. Even mainstream narratives that purport to celebrate and legitimize the Panthers simultaneously depict Newton as a “thug,” maligning through obviously racialized terms not only the Black Panther Party’s “chief theoretician” but also the Black, inner-city poor that Newton sought to organize and died trying to liberate. 18 There have been great historiographic and theoretical strides made in the last decade and a half to better account for the wide political-strategic range of the BPP as a social movement, from a renewed focus on their social programs to their partial origins in university-based study groups. 19 At the same time, however, the apparently increasing unwillingness of historians and theorists to honestly square the illegality, violence, and lumpenproletarian character of Panther members, politics, and strategy with the Panthers’ perceptive intellectual insights has served to further divorce academics and leftists alike from realistic conceptions of what significant political contestation actually looks like and who it includes. That is, the move to “save” the history of the Panthers from the simplistic demonization to which it was almost unilaterally subjected between the 1960s and the 1990s seems to have come hand in hand with a watering down of their militancy and a dismissal of the poor, street-based culture that produced the Party in the first place. 20

Other accounts fail to engage with the uniqueness of the political theory produced by Newton and the Panthers, often conflating the Party with other movements from the era. It is also the case that much of the political “left” today simply refuses to read theory produced by the BPP, to say nothing of other Black radical thought. Still others even urge that we move on beyond the Black Panther Party precisely as they are finally being treated with nuance by scholars and the public alike. 21 And yet, what are we to make of an organization that has long been considered the paragon of the Black Power movement, but was not only often at odds with the very person who coined the phrase “black power” but actively developed alliances with both white Hollywood celebrities and poor Appalachian migrants, with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Mizrahi Israelis alike? 22 More to the point, what are we to make of Newton’s own insistence that—when they have done the job that has to be done—“the Black Panther Party will no longer be the Black Panther Party”? 23

This essay is meant to serve as an introduction to “Intercommunalism” (1974) and as a contextualization of Newton’s theory of intercommunalism as a whole. Those in search of theory to inform their political practice will find value in Newton’s treatment of the problems of race, nationalism, and internationalism, his speculations on the future of surplus populations and questions of class composition, and the role of information technology in future possibilities for struggle. Through the rest of this essay, I (1) outline Huey Newton’s political-economic account of global empire, (2) contextualize Newton’s philosophical method—dialectical materialism—within his personal intellectual history, and (3) trace the progression of the Black Panther Party’s “official ideology” from Black Nationalism to Revolutionary Intercommunalism, informed by historical debates within the Black Liberation movement. In the second half, applying Newton’s theory, I (4) offer a new interpretation of the BPP’s shift in strategy from “self defense” to “survival pending revolution,” (5) give an account of the political import of the BPP’s Oakland commune, and (6) reflect on some connections to political struggles today.

Reactionary Intercommunalism

“We see then that the United States controls other countries thousands of miles away and uses their resources to benefit the ruling circle in America. The same situation holds for the many communities of the oppressed within the United States. Therefore the evidence shows very clearly that the United States is not a nation for its boundaries are extended into every territory of the world. The United States is an empire.”24

Newton’s theory of intercommunalism seeks to provide an explanation for the dominating and ultimately determining political force of American capitalist empire on the world stage, the corresponding decline of the political influence of nation-states, and the deterioration of nationalism as a potentially liberatory political ideology. He refers to this condition and phase of capitalism as reactionary intercommunalism. According to Newton in 1970, nation-states can no longer meaningfully be said to exist. Instead, global capital has, through U.S. empire in particular, reduced the world to a collection of communities that lack control over their local conditions of life and which can at most only become autonomous “liberated territories” within that larger empire. These communities can, however, by seizing the material structures that allow for production, technology, and information media, fight to build an interconnected and “coöperative framework” among themselves in a global dynamic that he calls revolutionary intercommunalism. 25 In the words of Elaine Brown, chairwoman of the BPP from 1974 to 1977, Newton’s notion of reactionary intercommunalism is an early conceptualization of what is today “casually euphemized by the capitalist class as ‘globalization.’” 26 The theory of intercommunalism as a whole is an attempt to both describe how revolutionary change might be expected to unfold going forward given these conditions of global empire but also to prescribe how one might go about playing an agential role in such a project. Dialectical materialism is Newton’s preferred method for understanding how one might come to derive what that role is, given that it is not static and pre-established, but must be assessed from an analysis of material conditions as they develop. “The concept of intercommunalism not only accurately describes and defines the situation, it also implies our obligation to unify and share with these dispersed communities the wealth which has been stolen from them and centralized here in the United States.” 27 During the particular turning point in the history of the Black Panther Party when he developed the theory, Newton was also deeply concerned with how Black people in particular might attain liberation without relying upon a state that purports to represent them as a people or nation. According to Newton, any efforts by Black people to gain national sovereignty or independence while global capitalism still exists could only lead to alternate forms of subjugation under American empire.

The text of Newton’s “Intercommunalism” (1974) begins with a long (and surprising) excerpt from David Horowitz’s Empire and Revolution: A Radical Interpretation of Contemporary History. 28 Horowitz was a New Left Marxist who in the 1980s converted to hardline conservativism. In this excerpt from 1969, however, he argues that as capitalist competition inevitably tends towards monopoly capitalism and the consolidation of power in the hands of a few, it expands in reach from the domestic to the global in the form of imperialism. Newton is concerned with theorizing a form of imperialism which is increasingly tied less to the interests of the nation-state that deploys its military abroad than to the interests of the businesses that benefit from that deployment. As “the centralization and concentration of economic power increasingly divorce[s] legal ownership from [actual] control,” (Horowitz) an ever smaller number of capitalist enterprises make use of the military strength of a small set of imperialist nation-states to exert de facto economic, political, and military control over all other enterprises, territories, and people. 29 Corporations might be said to increasingly develop sovereignty through and then over nation-states. As Elaine Brown has pointed out, in the 1970s, “numerous corporations openly argued… that as they controlled greater wealth than most of the member states of the United Nations, they should be seated accordingly.” 30 Newton quotes Horowitz further: “capitalism unified the nation state only to [later] herald the transcendence of the nation-state and emergence of international relations on a truly global scale.” 31

John Narayan’s recently published “Huey P. Newton’s Intercommunalism: An Unacknowledged Theory of Empire” is invaluable for its closer examination of the economic aspects of Newton’s theory. Narayan does the necessary work of comparing and contrasting Newton’s theorizations to subsequently developed Marxist accounts of the relationship between imperialism, globalization, and the nation-state, particularly those of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 32 In “The Wages of Whiteness in the Absence of Wages: Racial Capitalism, Reactionary Intercommunalism and the Rise of Trumpism,” Narayan also convincingly argues that Newton was apparently correct to be concerned that these economic dynamics might, to the detriment of an ideal class solidarity, create the conditions for a strengthening of xenophobia, racism, and newer populist nationalisms in the United States. 33 Ultimately, Narayan concludes that “Newton’s narration of the effects of reactionary intercommunalism on the revolutionary potential of the multitude holds more empirical validity than the narration of empire offered by his successors.” 34

In his 1974 essay “Who Makes U.S. Foreign Policy?”, Newton speaks at length about the ideological relationship between U.S.-based corporations and the overseas military activity of the U.S. government. 35 In “Intercommunalism” (1974), Newton directly quotes President Woodrow Wilson, who in 1907 stated: “Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down.” 36 To Newton’s point, it is hard to imagine that U.S.-based corporations would have the power that they do today, accumulating profit in 188 of 193 countries, with S&P 500 “growth” increasingly being disconnected from U.S. GDP “growth,” if active duty U.S. military were not simultaneously deployed in 170 of those countries, with about 800 military bases in over 70 of them, in order to protect those corporations’ interests in the case of unrest. 37 Newton states that “we can even refer to this army as the intercommunal police force. They control communities they do not live in and have no interest in, and they are controlled by the ruling clique for the purposes of profit and personal and military might.” 38 In 1950, as justification for entering Korea, the United States executive branch under President Truman first started using the term “police action” to refer to military actions pursued without a formal and constitutional congressional declaration of war.

But the political economic dynamics that define “reactionary intercommunalism,” Newton insists, also create the conditions for revolutionary possibility. Most specifically, as more and more of the daily efforts of the global working poor are dictated by a smaller set of corporations and states, more of the global population is brought together by their shared relationship to those workplaces and the technologies that hold them together: “the centralization of production” produces the “socialization of production: the development of an increasingly interdependent and coöperative basis of social labor.” 39 This interdependence and connectedness creates the conditions for a greater shared lived experience and therefore a possibly greater level of solidarity among the employed, underemployed, and unemployed of the world. For Newton, an awareness of this dynamic possibility follows from a conception of reality grounded in the philosophy of dialectical materialism.

Dialectical Materialism

“Power is the ability to define phenomena and make them act in a desired manner” 40

“Young people generally feel that the role of the revolutionary is to define a set of actions and a set of principles that are easy to identify and are absolute. But what I was trying to explain to them was the process: revolution, basically, is a contradiction between the old and the new in the process of development. Anything can be revolutionary at a particular point in time, but most of the students don’t understand that. And most other people don’t understand it either.” 41

Consistent with the ancient Greek approach according to which philosophy is pursued always for a practical purpose—to understand better how to live “the good life”—for Newton, no ethical, social, or political goal can be adequately pursued without a philosophical examination and understanding of the world in which that pursuit might occur. For this reason, Newton begins his explanation of intercommunalism first by engaging with a series of inquiries concerning how knowledge of reality might be attained.42

In Newton’s 1970 presentation at Boston College, he begins this epistemological pursuit first through an explanation of the structure of empiricism, identifying its basis in subjectivity and its resultant limits, the strengths and shortcomings of observation, and the scientific method’s dependence on a priori assumptions, which are treated as unexamined truths. 43 Drawing then from Kant, he argues for the advantages of analytic reasoning—conceived of as internally consistent and independent from the external world—and then asserts that a Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism attempts to draw from the strengths of both empiricism and rationalism (pure reason) to better account for how phenomena in the world are constituted and transformed. “Marx, as a social scientist, criticized other social scientists for attempting to explain phenomena, or one phenomenon, by taking it out of its environment, isolating it, putting it into a category, and not acknowledging the fact that once it was taken out of its environment the phenomenon was transformed.” 44 In his 1971 presentation at Yale University, he begins this portion of his talk by instead contrasting idealism and materialism. 45 In the 1974 text that we are reproducing here, he subjects both idealism and materialism to an approximately Cartesian-style series of skeptical doubts, and from this skeptical ground then informs us that the Black Panther Party has ideologically chosen to be materialist, and specifically has taken up dialectical materialism, which accounts for reality by identifying the “fundamental internal contradictions” in all things. 46

It is not possible here to defend this thoroughly, but I believe that a closer tracing and analysis of Newton’s epistemological arguments across the span of his writings should reveal a shift over time from a younger Newton consumed with skepticism and doubt 47—compelled often to question the nature of reality and the purpose of human life—to one who later instead embraces affirmational philosophies that assert a positive ontology and thereby offer clearer political possibilities. This strategic shift away from skepticism and even partial nihilism 48 is evident especially after his release from solitary confinement 49 and culminates in his embrace of dialectical materialism, which would be his guiding philosophy thereafter.

Dialectical materialism structured Newton’s conceptions of what the world is and what kinds of activity are possible in it. For him, dialectical materialism makes clear that nothing is static, that nothing is isolated, that the world is transformed through constant flux and antagonisms, and that some form of knowledge of these turning points can be acquired through a combination of observation and rational reflection. Dialectical materialism also serves as a method that makes it possible to identify how the key center of conflict in any situation may have shifted. Accordingly, the BPP as an organization was constantly adapting both their strategy and their tactics as they experienced struggle and reflected on it. Their most prominent shift early in the Party’s history, from black nationalism to revolutionary nationalism, was formally codified in their Ten Point Program, which changed from insisting on an “end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community” in 1966, to, by 1969, instead calling for “an end to the robbery by the capitalist of our Black and oppressed communities.” 50

Fred Hampton, Chair of the Illinois chapter of the BPP, explained the Party’s use of dialectical materialism through metaphor:

Did you ever see something and pull it and you take it as far as you can and it almost outstretches itself and it goes into something else? If you take it so far that it is two things? As a matter of fact, some things if you stretch it so far, it’ll be another thing. Did you ever cook something so long that it turns into something else? …That’s what we’re talking about with politics. That politics ain’t nothing, but if you stretch it so long that it can’t go no further, then you know what you got on your hands? You got an antagonistic contradiction. 51

Under Newton’s dialectical materialist conception of the world, contradictions exist everywhere, but only certain ones are antagonistic contradictions and, when pushed, these by definition will inevitably transform the whole dynamic at hand. Newton’s conception of dialectics, which is observably deeply Maoist, is perhaps most fleshed out in “Utopia: Universal Life Energy.” 52 Following from this approach, Newton asserts that reactionary intercommunalism has necessarily created the conditions for its own potential destruction—in the form of revolutionary intercommunalism.

Revolutionary Intercommunalism

“When the people seize the means of production, when they seize the mass media and so forth, you will still have racism, you will still have ethnocentrism, you will still have contradictions. But the fact that the people will be in control of all the productive and institutional units of society—not only factories, but the media too—will enable them to start solving these contradictions. It will produce new values, new identities; it will mold a new and essentially human culture as the people resolve old conflicts based on cultural and economic conditions. At some point, there will be a qualitative change and the people will have transformed revolutionary intercommunalism into communism. We call it “communism” because at this point in history people will not only control the productive and institutional units of society, but they will also have seized possession of their own subconscious attitudes toward these things; and for the first time in history they will have a more rather than less conscious relationship to the material world—people, plants, books, machines, media, everything—in which they live. They will have power, that is, they will control the phenomena around them and make it act in some desired manner, and they will know their own real desires. The first step in this process is the seizure by the people of their own communities.” 53

Newton used his conception of dialectical materialism to both respond to and lead the BPP’s ideological and strategic turns. According to Newton, the Black Panther Party began as a black nationalist organization. Having observed that “most people in the past had solved some of their problems by forming into nations,” 54 they invested their efforts in pursuing a politics concerned with defending and empowering Black people as a distinct community. That said, from the start, they also critiqued cultural nationalist approaches, noting both their ineffectiveness for significantly changing the lives of most Black people and their popularity among more educated and affluent African Americans. 55 Some Afrocentric approaches to cultural nationalism in the 20th century seemed at times to imply that liberation might come simply from dressing differently or changing one’s name—by asserting a newly produced identity as an individual or as part of a community. 56 At the same time, however, the Panthers deeply valued political education, aware of its profound psychological impact on youth especially, and they made learning about African and African diasporic history a requirement for membership. Among Panthers on the East Coast especially, changing one’s name was a common practice, drawn from a religious tradition that was central to Black Islam and was epitomized through the figure and life of Malcolm X, a.k.a. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, who served as a symbol of reinvention and personal transformation for countless radicals in the 1960s and beyond. 57 However, the BPP also always regarded cultural nationalism as only a stepping stone in a dialectical process, insufficient on its own for bringing about revolution. They were deeply critical of African or Black-led states that were nonetheless authoritarian, or capitalist, or within which Black people were still poor. To be for Black liberation meant then necessarily also to be against capitalism. Newton recounts how he came to his position, years before the Party was established:

“It was my life plus independent reading that made me a socialist—nothing else. I became convinced of the benefits of collectivism and a collectivist ideology. I also saw the link between racism and the economics of capitalism, although, despite the link, I recognized that it was necessary to separate the concepts in analyzing the general situation. In psychological terms, racism could continue to exist even after the economic problems that had created racism had been resolved. Never convinced that destroying capitalism would automatically destroy racism, I felt, however, that we could not destroy racism without wiping out its economic foundation. It was necessary to think much more creatively and independently about these complex interconnections.” 58

For these reasons, and many more, the Black Panther Party quickly shifted towards revolutionary nationalism, grounded in the need to transform the economic organization of society in order to transform it politically. 59

Within a year of the BPP’s founding, however, Party leadership would come to the conclusion that the Black community in the U.S. could not, practically speaking, become a nation-state—secure, with their own territory and with full control over their economic, political, and cultural life—after all. “It is an endless circle, you see: to achieve nationhood, we needed to become a dominant force; but to become a dominant force, we needed to be nation.” 60 More to the point, if African Americans were indeed ever able to establish a separate nation-state, even if it were socialist, Newton argued, there would be little to stop the U.S. from invading and turning it into a colony in the traditional imperialist fashion, or, more likely, from asserting economic control over it in the contemporary “neo-colonial” manner. 61 Given the immense power of the United States, the solution could only be then for the BPP to ally themselves with other oppressed peoples, domestically and abroad.

According to contemporary genetic science, racial categories as people popularly believe in them today are demonstrably invalid. However, racial categories are not mere fantasy either, nor can they be used as an easy means for individual self-expression. Modern racial categories are not chosen but rather are imposed, their most important function is to dehumanize, and they are made real through processes of political domination and exploitation. Huey Newton’s thought often reflects an awareness of the social and political constructedness of blackness as a category. In his words: “I knew the difference between white people and black people, of course, but the cue was always the way white people treated us, not the color itself.” 62 Of course, situated in a historical context, Newton considered the category of blackness still a necessary one for recognizing certain material dynamics (eg. genocide, the racialized character of colonization, lumpenization, etc.) and also as a ground for political solidarity. It was a category that received extra emphasis in the later years of the Oakland-based BPP, not as a hindrance to international alliances but as a way to strengthen them. That said, Newton ultimately considered it politically necessary to eventually establish a “universal identity,” disconnected from “cultural, racial, and religious chauvinism.” 63

Aiming to build alliances with oppressed people against capitalism wherever possible, the Black Panther Party officially became internationalist, forming political bonds across six continents with other revolutionary organizations and oppressed people. Historically, this was unremarkable, as non-Western socialists and communists of all stripes had throughout the 20th century worked to build alliances with each other and against European and American capitalism and imperialism. Indeed, in many ways internationalism was already part of the background for the Black Panther Party, which formed in 1966, the same year that The Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America was founded in Cuba, followed soon after by the publication of the Tricontinental magazine. The literature and social movements from which BPP members drew inspiration were consistently internationalist, from Kwame Nkrumah’s autobiography to Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. At the same time, the willingness of Newton to reconsider the Black Panther Party’s relationship to Black American identity was in many ways a continuation of a gesture that other U.S.-based Black revolutionaries had already made—from Malcolm X to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers—in using the word “Black” to refer not just to people of partial African descent but as a revolutionary catch-all category, so that the “Black revolution” could include revolutions in Asia and Latin America, and “Black people” could include all “people of color who are engaged in revolutionary struggle in the United States and all over the world.” 64

And yet, by 1970, Newton came to reject even internationalism as a flawed revolutionary strategy. The reasons for this rejection are based in at least two problems or “contradictions,” one external to the BPP and one internal to it.

The first problem is grounded in Newton’s understanding of the world under reactionary intercommunalism and what kind of resistance is even possible within it. As Brown has put it, “Huey concluded that the capitalists of the United States had succeeded in reducing the rest of the world to a collection of communities, no different in terms of territorial sovereignty or control over resources than oppressed communities inside the United States.” 65 Since there were no more nations, one could not have true internationalism, much less among oppressed people. Put more strongly, “the people and the economy are so integrated into the imperialist empire that it’s impossible to ‘decolonize,’ to return to the former conditions of existence”; and “if colonies cannot decolonize and return to their original existence as nations, then nations no longer exist. Nor, we believe, will they ever exist again.” 66 Instead, for Newton, there can only exist liberated territories within the larger expanse of the global American empire. As long as that empire still exists, these liberated territories must constantly struggle to maintain their autonomy from capitalism and imperialism both. Already by 1974, we see Newton question the extent to which the Soviet Union and The People’s Republic of China could be considered truly independent, communist nation-states:

“By whom are the Chinese, for instance, forced? They are forced by the actions of the United States. Instead of putting their money into the schools, the hospitals, and into institutions in their community, they are forced to maintain a large military. So their liberated territory is very similar to what happened in the riots and rebellions in Detroit where, for about 4 or 5 days the blacks there held about 8 blocks and they drove the local police and the national guard out and the peace was not restored… They only held their territory for 4 days, they could have had a revolutionary provisional government and we would have recognized it just as we recognized the People’s Republic of China… We do not recognize them as a nation but as a liberated territory and a community that is somewhat free, but it can only maintain its freedom through a constant fight.” 67

The second problem Newton encountered had to do with how internationalism was received by the Black community. Immediately upon his release from prison in 1970, Newton announced an offer of troops on behalf of the Black Panther Party to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, a material expression of internationalist solidarity. The backlash from Black elites 68 was less of a concern than the backlash that came from the mass base of the Party:

“…Our offer of troops to the Vietnamese received negative reactions from the people, truly oppressed people. Welfare recipients wrote letters saying, ‘I thought the Party was for us; why do you want to give those dirty Vietnamese our life blood?’ I would call this a contradiction, one we are trying to solve. We are trying to give some therapy, you might say, to our community and lift their consciousness but first we have to be accepted. […] We try to do whatever is possible to meet the patient on the grounds that he or she can best relate to, because, after all, they are the issue.” 69

Newton’s critique of internationalism was influenced by the need to address the ideological relationship of the Black community in particular to American nationalism. As Americans—even for the most marginalized, poor, and recently immigrated among us—we are inclined to uphold the false belief in our exceptionalism and superiority, if not at least our social difference. The vitality of nationalism is in part maintained by the state’s dispensation of certain material privileges and a symbolic status unto a population based off of the mere and arbitrary facts of their birth. The defensive retort that “we” must take care of “our own” serves to obscure the active role that we play in disconnecting ourselves from the suffering of the rest of the world, even when it is in fact deeply connected to our own suffering. 70 I would forward that Newton was able to identify that this reactionary tendency necessarily reasserts itself through the nationalism that is presumed within internationalism.

Several theorists in recent years have tackled the matter of the historically unique position that diasporic African people have been forced into under modernity—arguably one of incommensurable subjection, and even abjection. For these thinkers, the forced “social death” of diasporic Africans, as a continued effect of slavery, is an indispensable feature of western society, or perhaps of capitalism. In some ways, Newton might be said to agree with the basic intuitions behind some of these views, but, informed by his intercommunalist perspective, he comes to opposite conclusions.

For Newton, all oppressed people within the bounds of American Empire are in some sense colonized. 71 Furthermore, though, because “Black people” in America compose a uniquely colonized community, comparable to colonized communities in other parts of the world while simultaneously located within the very center of the empire, the community is in a uniquely privileged position to destroy that empire. Specifically, Newton considered Black people in the U.S. to be in the ideal position to act as the vanguard for a global revolution against reactionary intercommunalism. “We believe that black Americans are the first real internationalists; not just the Black Panther Party, but black people who live in America… We have been internationally dispersed by slavery, and we can easily identify with other people in other cultures. Because of slavery, we never really felt attached to the nation in the same way that the peasant was attached to the soil in Russia.” 72

According to official Black Panther Party ideology, African diasporic people in the Americas are not a minority, but rather members of the colonized majority, imported over centuries to build the foundational wealth and heart of the empire. 73 This means that we, like other oppressed groups in the U.S., “reap benefits” from the exploitation of the rest of the world but are also in a strategic position to uproot that empire at its base. 74

“If we believe we are brother with the people of Mozambique, how can we help? They need arms and other material aid. We have no weapons to give. We have no money for materials. Then how do we help? … They cannot fight for us. We cannot fight in their place. We can each narrow the territory that our common oppressor occupies. We can liberate ourselves, learning from and teaching each other along the way. But the struggle is the same; the enemy is the same.” 75

Within a reactionary intercommunalist world, intercommunal solidarity and revolutionary struggle is to fight locally for one’s own freedom as well as the freedom of those far away. Intercommunalism is therefore Newton’s non-statist theoretical frame—a frame that insists that one’s political vision must be able to see past the limits of border ideology.

The Long Durée of the Black Panther Party: A New Reason to Exist

By 1970, the federal government and many state and municipal governments had already escalated the harassment of the BPP to the level of open war, using assassinations, military-style SWAT deployments, undercover operatives, and psychological warfare to dismantle the movement. However, contrary to typical narratives and conceptions about the sudden decline of the party at this time, the period between 1971 and approximately 1982 in fact encompasses the majority of the BPP’s history, whether we take this to refer to the increasingly commune-like Oakland chapter or to the guerrilla activities of the Black Liberation Army and affiliated cells based on the East Coast, in the Midwest, in the South and elsewhere. 76 While total membership dramatically contracted, an effect of both state repression and purges, various iterations of the Black Panther movement persisted for another decade.

For what has come to be called “the Newton faction” (or, more misleadingly, the “West Coast faction”) there was a sharp strategic turn away from openly violent political contestation with the state and a shift instead towards the development of autonomous institutions and social service programs—what has historically since then been described critically by many as reformism. Newton’s stance on this matter is plain, though perhaps still poorly understood: “A Ten Point Program is not revolutionary in itself, nor is it reformist. It is a survival program. We, the people, are threatened with genocide because racism and fascism are rampant in this country and throughout the world.” 77 I offer that Newton’s analysis of conditions at the time led him and the Party towards a renewed focus on social reproduction as a primary terrain of political struggle, shifting to a strategy oriented towards developing local, autonomous organs of power, ideally tied to land. That is, the fact of the severe poverty of Black people made clear that the Party had to play a more prominent role in sustaining the people themselves, while simultaneously also working to establish institutions that would allow all people to eventually disconnect from capitalism and connect instead to the Party organization as their primary means to life. 78 In contrast to the BPP’s Free Breakfast programs, which in 1969 were initiated under the motto of “serve the people” and were designed to provide resources to the black and poor, enhance recruitment of members, and build legitimacy within the community at large, the period after the middle of 1971 marked the expansion of a strategy that Newton called “survival pending revolution.” 79 Before Newton’s release from prison, this shift was already partially underway through the grassroots efforts of regional chapters, headed by the initiative of mostly female rank-and-file members, and through the program-building of David Hilliard in particular. For the Black Panther Party, the very survival of Black people was a political question and the very thing to struggle over.

Early in the BPP’s formation, the organization was deeply influenced by Frantz Fanon’s argument that the unemployed, underemployed, and criminalized third world lumpenproletariat would be the group that would most likely bring about revolution, rather than the traditional waged “working class.” 80 The Party’s concern with survival was both inspired by their focus on this population, which through dispossession, poverty, and criminalization is continuously exposed to death, but also by an analysis of the effects of increasing rates of unemployment and underemployment for all people globally, with the loss of jobs understood as an effect of automation and the increasing vitality of capitalist empire. 81 The BPP’s analysis of this process of lumpenization shares affinities and was contemporaneous with that of James and Grace Lee Boggs who, in Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook, argue that urban Black youth experience first and perhaps most acutely what is to be increasingly experienced by more and more of the global workforce in general. In the U.S., because Black wage-workers have historically been among “the last hired and the first fired,” they have long been well-acquainted with the psychological feeling of abandonment and the material exposure to death that large portions of the 21st “white working class” have only more recently been forced to confront.

Newton’s theory of intercommunalism is accordingly grounded in the question of what is to happen to a proletarian “working class” that is increasingly no longer useful to capitalism as workers and is likely to be eventually “transformed out of existence” altogether. 82 Newton argues that these conditions make it necessary—if we are to survive—to come up with a different conception of ourselves. That is, both the material opportunities for waged work will dwindle, but also perhaps the ‘worker identity’ as such may cease to exist, requiring a new self-conception or form of “class” consciousness to be established. No longer can the figure of the class-conscious worker with a waged relationship to production, idealized within capitalist society as a ‘productive member of society,’ be assumed to be the central actor in a revolutionary narrative, a tenuous claim in the first place. However else one might gain access to the means to consumption, with or without the wage, may come to be the primary mode of survival and political struggle, Newton and the Panthers thought:

“Today’s capitalist has developed machinery to such a point that he can hire a group of specialized people called technocrats. In the near future he will certainly do more of this, and the technocrat will be too specialized to be identified as a proletarian. …In fact that group of technocrats will be so vital we will have to do something to explain the presence of other people; we will have to come up with another definition and reason for existing.” 83

To be made part of the surplus population under capitalism is to be allowed or even actively made to simply perish; this process has always gone hand in hand with racialization and dehumanization. 84

The reality of genocide under capitalism, whether intentional or brought about by governmental abandonment, has been largely self-evident to the Black radical left for a long time, however. In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress, an organization led by Black Communists, submitted a petition to the United Nations titled “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People,” accusing the U.S. of multiple acts of genocide over the preceding century and drawing from the U.N.’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide signed just three years prior. In the year before his assassination in 1965, Malcolm X revived this pursuit, seeking support from multiple foreign heads of state for the prospect of bringing a case against the United States for having violated the human rights of African Americans. 85 Malcolm sought to shift the struggle from one focused on civil rights, appealing to the state to address grievances, to one for human rights, appealing instead to the Third World-dominated United Nations of the time and humanistic principles in general. George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye also makes genocide a central theme in 1971, his concerns grounded in the then quite-common fear that fascism was on the rise within the United States. All that said, Newton was particularly concerned with the more daily and normalized instantiations of genocide; he wrote at length, for example, about Black children in the South who, merely for lack of shoes, are regularly exposed to parasites that hinder cognitive development, a problem which still continues today. 86

If we consider one of Newton’s most Maoist maxims—“War is politics with bloodshed; Politics is war without bloodshed”—then we can understand how matters of everyday health, social organization, and governance are indeed matters of life and death, and ergo political struggle. Newton wanted the BPP to “put up obstacles against annihilation on a local level,” by contending politically over the control of resources, territory, commodity flows, and popular legitimacy. 87 Crucially then, while Newton’s analysis of capitalist imperialism (reactionary intercommunalism) can be described as “non-territorial,” his prescription for how to resist it—how to bring about revolutionary intercommunalism—emphasizes the importance of territorial control, alongside economic and ideological power. 88 This analysis guided the Black Panther Party Oakland chapter’s decision to attempt to transform itself from the Central Committee of an international movement to a local, self-sustaining commune and bulwark against capitalist control. 89

Newton earned his Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz on June 15, 1980

The Oakland Commune and Liberated Territories

In 1971, the Oakland-based Central Committee began forcibly closing regional BPP chapters and recruiting leaders from each locale to bolster the Oakland-based chapter as it was restructured. Under Newton’s increasingly singular and authoritarian leadership, the Oakland chapter made dramatic shifts to expand the breadth and impact of their social service-oriented programs, including developing more medical clinics, free clothing programs, free food distributions, and opening several liberation schools. 90 Less well known, the BPP also consolidated control over twenty-one properties mostly in the Bay Area, developed plans to operate their own factories, and even made an effort to take control of the Port of Oakland which at the time was the second largest port in the world in terms of container tonnage. 91

They also began reengaging with institutions they had previously rejected altogether, such as Black businesses and Black churches. 92 These new strategies were informed by Newton’s dialectical materialist logic, according to which the Party analyzed the conditions of the time and sought to reassess who might be friend or foe by pushing at the population in question until they were forced to choose sides though their actions. In this fashion, the BPP leveraged the Black identity of Black business owners to acquire not just resources for the party, but a regularized tribute, first requesting or insisting on their support by appealing to Black solidarity, and then organizing boycotts with the community to exert economic pressure as necessary. 93 If these means failed, then the BPP chose to extort—by threats or violent means—any businesses that refused to consent until they either gave in to BPP demands or revealed themselves to be “enemies of the people.” In this instance the BPP simultaneously understood and asserted themselves as “the people,” but also as the vanguard acting on behalf of “the people’s” interests. 94 The BPP aimed to leverage these relationships with capitalists while nonetheless maintaining that, ultimately “there is no salvation in capitalism.” 95 Newton’s position was that under reactionary intercommunalism, relative to the dominant power of élite global capitalists, the Black bourgeoisie is in fact mostly powerless—“a fantasy bourgeoisie, and this is true of most of the white bourgeoisie too”—and so they can be recruited or made of use of accordingly. 96

In March of 1972 the BPP held a three-day “Black Community Survival Conference” to strengthen relationships with the National Welfare Rights Organization, churches, and local gangs towards the goal of cultivating community control with an explicitly intercommunalist praxis. 97 This conference also featured both the participation of Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American major party candidate for president, and, significantly, BPP Chairman Bobby Seale’s announcement that the BPP would begin running candidates for office, ranging from community boards to the office of mayor. 98 As far as I am able to discern, the BPP’s electoral campaigns between 1972 and 1975 should perhaps indeed be best understood as explicitly reformist, less oriented at establishing “dual power” in the Leninist sense than with making the Party more politically legible and with improving conditions of life for the residents of Oakland in general. 99 These campaigns appear at odds with Newton’s explicit statement, made as late as April 1971, that the BPP would never run candidates for office. 100 Most resonant in this discussion however is the fact that this period in the BPP’s history remains still woefully undertheorized by mainstream scholars.

By 1974, after the most prominent of these electoral campaigns had failed, Party membership contracted dramatically to about 100 members, not including students enrolled in the Liberation Schools, and the organizational structure had been fully transformed. Concerning “the communal life of the Black Panther Party,” Newton stated:

“The closeness of the group and the shared sense of purpose transform us into a harmonious, functioning body, working for the destruction of those conditions that make people suffer. Our unity has transformed us to the point where we have not compromised with the system; we have the closeness and love of family life, the will to live in spite of cruel conditions. Consciousness is the first step toward control of a situation. We feel free as a group; we know what troubles us, and we act.” 101

For all its strengths, the weaknesses of the Oakland chapter between 1974 and 1982 in many ways mirrored the weaknesses typical of other 20th century leftist communes. 102 All members were required to engage in regular “self-criticism and re-education,” to attend the BPP’s Son of Man Temple, to meet work quotas, and the liberation school featured mandatory communal dorming for all students. Particularly sexist polygamy and gendered violence was not uncommon, and physical violence of all sorts was often used to create internal discipline. 103 In one of Newton’s least theoretically disciplined but perhaps most audacious texts, “On the Relevance of the Church,” written near the peak of the public feud between him and Eldridge Cleaver, Newton explains matter-of-factly that the survival programs would face minimal labor costs because the Party would be forcing its members to work for free. 104 In a notably Maoist gesture consistent with this approach, a cover page from Newton’s first published collection of writings states simply: “The Black Panther Party is an ox for the people.” 105 Needless to say, the fact of a progressive or revolutionary organization developing such internally oppressive dynamics is typically and rightfully enough to provoke denunciations. Importantly, however, moralistic criticisms typically do little to further an analysis of the political realities that produce such dynamics. In the following footnote, I offer a series of speculative gestures towards how we might begin to analyze the Oakland commune’s coercive dynamics in light of larger structural conditions. 106

It is also the case that, despite forceful writings against sexism, Newton as an individual spent much of his life before and towards the end of the Party both produced by and reproducing the dynamics of inner-city violence and harmful masculinism that many men in the U.S. experience as a series of limits and requirements for the fulfillment of their gender. 107 These dynamics have been conflated with the illegalist politics of the Black Panther Party by detractors, in part because the modern concept of ‘criminality’ functions largely to obscure powerful forms of political contestation and struggle by the poor, and in part perhaps because the material conditions that allow illegalist politics of resistance to flourish today depend on some of the structures that prop up oppression in modern society in the first place. In 1974, after allegedly murdering Kathleen Smith, Newton fled prosecution and sought self-exile in Cuba, remaining there for three years. Upon his return and acquittal, he then sought refuge within academia, studying until he earned his doctorate in 1980. However, the government-fostered draw of narcotics that struck the Black community as a whole during this time period would haunt Newton through the 1980s as well. Already in 1971, Newton’s growing paranoia—intentionally conditioned by the crushing effects of solitary confinement and the FBI’s finely calibrated psychological harassment—and his resultant political authoritarianism were increasingly evident and would gradually worsen with time. 108 Though the decline in Newton’s health would become fully clear only later, it is not presumptuous to suggest that Newton’s mental state likely influenced the BPP policy decision to purge the Party and contract the national chapters in 1972.

Despite Newton’s extraordinary commitment to theoretical consistency, I would argue that in some ways Newton failed to apply his own theory of intercommunalism to its full logical conclusion. As Black Panther Party members and allies nationwide increasingly suffered assassinations and military attacks at the hands of the state, the Central Committee and Newton came to the conclusion that the movement had over-extended itself and had started aboveground military operations “too early.” 109 For this reason, among others, the Oakland chapter put considerable effort into contracting national chapters, forcibly closing them, reassigning leaders from across the country to work in Oakland, and ending support for chapters that had refused to shut down. However, it is important to understand that few BPP chapters were, strictly speaking, simply offspring of the Oakland chapter. Many BPP chapters were autonomously run with little material support from the Oakland chapter; some had historically preceded the BPP itself and had simply taken on the Panther name and symbols while pursuing local goals; some organizations shared political affinities and sold the BPP paper but did not explicitly join the party; and one chapter—New York City’s—had a larger total membership than even the original branch in Oakland. 110 If one conceives of these organizations not as chapters of one national organization but as distinct local movements seeking to become liberated territories against reactionary intercommunalism, then for the Oakland chapter to insist on authority over all of these disparate organizations would be akin to the BPP insisting on authority over the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam with whom they had expressed solidarity in 1970. The on-the-ground conditions in the Midwest were distinct from those in Oakland, which were further distinct from those in New York City, and presumably they would have all required differentiated strategies and tactics.

One might charge then that, by asserting authority over all “national” chapters, Newton was falling into the very belief in the bounds and borders of the nation-state that he had fundamentally criticized through his theory of intercommunalism. This is not to argue that any of these local sites of conflict would have otherwise become liberated territories had the Oakland chapter not “interfered.” Nor should it be assumed that any of these local organizations thought of their own struggles in terms of intercommunalism. However, according to Newton’s theory, neither did they necessarily have to. There is also the question of whether Newton’s theory would have necessitated a particular or differentiated strategy of struggle for those (inter-)communes that happened to be located closest to the heart of the global empire. What is clear, however, is that the Oakland chapter ended up in practice functioning as yet another political body, in addition to the FBI and local police, that some local chapters found themselves pitted against.

Today

“Revolutionary intercommunalism and the good anarchy that Marx spies afar off at the ‘end’ of History are worldly, of this world.”111

While Newton’s body of thought on intercommunalism is extensive, much of it is scattered across various speeches, interviews, and contributions to the Panther newspaper, whose name was changed from the “Black Community News Service” to the “Intercommunal News Service” in February of 1971. In her under-cited “Long Live Third World Unity! Long Live Internationalism: Huey P. Newton’s Revolutionary Intercommunalism,” Besenia Rodriguez begins the work of drawing from the newspaper, as well as from other archival materials not engaged with here. Still, what is available currently offers much to those thinking about contemporary struggles for liberation. For one, Newton’s insistence on strategizing beyond the nation-state in a way different from that of the older generation of internationalists should resonate for those today struggling with the limitations and problems of pursuing “democratic socialism” within the bounds of the nation-state. Newton might urge us to reconsider whether organizations or movements based in, say, San Diego, might be able to develop more productive solidarities with organizations and movements based in Tijuana rather with ones in New York City. While San Diego and New York City might share some political beliefs and perhaps also material limitations imposed by federal laws, other dynamics such as economic flows, community composition, and major language might be more significant for determining political possibilities, rather than whether or not two organizations exist on the same side of a legal border.

Newton’s theory might also help us make more sense of the kinds of non-statist and proto-statist political movements that have arisen and somehow persisted in recent decades—such as with the Zapatistas in Mexico or Kurdish Rojava—while national revolutions have increasingly failed. A conscious shift towards the pursuit of a kind of politics of autonomy within or across nation-states can be also identified across the political spectrum, from Michoacan and Hezbollah to transnational gangs and ISIS. In other moments, movements have articulated themselves in terms of explicit secessionism against or within a nation-state. In a recent piece written in its own seemingly “dialectical” mode, Robin D. G. Kelley praises the strategic approach of the Mississippi-based Coöperation Jackson, an outgrowth of the Jackson-Kush Plan, where municipal elections are being used as a way to funnel funds towards local movements seeking to build a base of autonomous power. 112 Kelley’s language seems to echo some of Newton’s: “In other words, concern with survival and the creation of new democratic institutions can consolidate power and move the city toward a sustainable future.” 113

And yet, while material practices or “forms of life” may indeed be the only practical grounds for radical solidarity under current global conditions, the matter of how to cultivate “class consciousness” through a mass base remains a question. The question of how people might be motivated to pursue radical change and how ideas might circulate under reactionary intercommunalism did not escape Newton either, however. In the foreword for To Die for the People, Elaine Brown explains: “Though he did not live long enough to know of the Internet, Huey argued that as technology was bringing the world ever closer together, the world’s people were poised to recognize their common oppressor and unite around their common oppression.” 114 David Kilcullen, senior counter-insurgency advisor to General Petraeus and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, identifies information itself as a particularly “soft target” that non-state actors can exploit in a contemporary world where war, crime, and the politics of resistance have become both blurred together and transnational. 115 He notes how otherwise improbable “solidarities” were developed through social media in the years preceding the Tunisian Revolution between sports hooligans and radical leftist hackers, helping to establish and spread forms of political consciousness that brought massification, riots, and violent clashes to the streets and intensified attacks on the state. This is also to say nothing of the increasing vibrancy of the digital terrain as a site of contestation over currency and resources. In the 1960s, the counterintuitive solidarities that the Black Panther Party fostered between Black religious communities, college students, Vietnam veterans, and unemployed street youth and gang members irked many on the left that insisted on a more limited conception of what properly constitutes a class. For Newton, in accordance with dialectical materialism, classes arise and disappear in history as an effect of material conditions of exploitation and oppression, and as antagonistic contradictions divide and re-divide populations in new ways.

References

1.

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The strengths of this piece are in large part due to the support and critique of Tyson Amir, Anna Cruz, Vanessa Dunstan, Kiran Garcha, Maya Gonzalez, Asad Haider, Lani Hanna, Patrick King, Zhandarka Kurti, Ben Mabie, and Rosa Petterson. I also extend my sincerest thanks to Frederika Newton and the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation for their support.

2.

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Besenia Rodriguez, “Long Live Third World Unity! Long Live Internationalism: Huey P. Newton’s Revolutionary Intercommunalism,” Souls 8:3 (2006), 119-141. Huey P. Newton, “Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 18, 1970,” To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Vintage, 1972), 20-38. Erik H. Erikson and Huey P. Newton, In Search of Common Ground: In Search of Common Ground: Conversations with Erik H. Erikson and Huey P. Newton (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973).

3.

↑

Judson Jeffries, “Introduction,” Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), xxvi.

4.

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Erikson and Newton, In Search of Common Ground, 16.

5.

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Huey P. Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974), Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Box 50, Folder 2-3. Collected in this dossier. Much of this material has in fact been prior published elsewhere, though in pieces across a variety of texts, including Huey P. Newton and Erik H. Erikson’s In Search of Common Ground, Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide, and in “Who Makes U.S. Foreign Policy?” (1974).

6.

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Newton, “Intercommunalism,” 1.

7.

↑

Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (University of California Press, 2013), 2. Elaine Brown, “Foreword,” To Die for the People, xviii. Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire. Robyn Spencer, Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero: A Life in Writing, ed. Kathleen Cleaver (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Rodriguez, “Long Live Third World Unity! Long Live Internationalism: Huey P. Newton’s Revolutionary Intercommunalism.”

8.

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Safiya Bukhari. “Building Support for Political Prisoners of War Incarcerated in North America,” The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, & Fighting for Those Left Behind, ed. Laura Whitehorn (New York: Feminist Press, 2010).

9.

↑

Huey P. Newton, with J. Herman Blake, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Penguin, 1973), 17-20.

10.

↑

Ibid, 54.

11.

↑

In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, Newton directly discusses or explicitly references the original works of Aristotle, Renée Descartes, David Hume, John Locke, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, V. I. Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Martin Delany, Frantz Fanon, Robert Williams, and Malcolm X; Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, B.F. Skinner, Herbert Hendin, Eric C. Lincoln, A.J. Ayers, and Bertrand Russell; Ecclesiastes, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Victor Hugo, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Claude Brown, James Baldwin, Julian Bond, and Angela Davis. See also: Judson Jeffries, Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist.

12.

↑

Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 53, 268-269.

13.

↑

Erikson and Newton, In Search of Common Ground, 133.

14.

↑

Erikson and Newton, In Search of Common Ground, 38-39. In response to a question from a student about the “problem of simplifying your ideology for the masses,” Newton replied, “Yes, that’s our big burden. So far I haven’t been able to do it well enough to keep from being booed off the stage, but we are learning. I think one way to show how dialectics works is to use practical example after practical example. The reason I am sometimes afraid to do that is that people will take each example and think, ‘Well, if this is true in one case, then it must be true in all other cases.”

15.

↑

Robert L. Trivers and Huey P. Newton, “The Crash of Flight 90: Doomed by Self-deception,” Science Digest. (Nov 1982). For more on their collaboration, see: Erika Lorraine Milam, “A Field Study of Con Games,” Isis 105.3 (The History of Science Society, 2014), 96-605.

16.

↑

For a subset of these essays, see: Huey P. Newton, The Huey P. Newton Reader, ed. David Hilliard and Donald Weise (Seven Stories Press, 2002).

17.

↑

Robyn Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, 118-119. An excerpt from the introduction to “The Son of Man”: “Mytho-religious and socio-political value systems are historical functions of each other. The dialectic of myth and politics, in fact, is history. […] Our argument is that the modern tradition of a messianic duality of sovereignty and humility is a very crude explanation for the dynamic of a politico-mythic dialectic.” Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Box 50, Folder 2.

18.

↑

Stanley Nelson, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, 2015.

19.

↑

For more on the BPP’s university-based origins, see Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (The University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

20.

↑

Newton, “Scoring,” Revolutionary Suicide, 78-90.

21.

↑

Cedric Johnson, “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” Catalyst, 1.1 (Spring 2017).

22.

↑

Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (Melville House, 2011). Alex Lubin, “The Black Panthers and the PLO: The Politics of Intercommunalism,” Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (North Carolina Scholarship Online, 2014).

23.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism,” 54. Emphasis in original.

24.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism: A Higher Level of Consciousness,” Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Box 48, Folder 4, pp. 6-7.

25.

↑

Garrett Epps, “Huey Newton Speaks at Boston College, Presents Theory of ‘Intercommunalism’,” Harvard Crimson, Nov 19 1970.

26.

↑

Brown, “Foreword,” To Die For the People, xxi.

27.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism: A Higher Level of Consciousness,” Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Box 48, Folder 4, pp. 11-12. See also, In Search of Common Ground, 73.

28.

↑

Newton cites pp. 29-45 from Horowitz’s 1970 text. Horowitz was a Marxist theorist associated with the Monthly Review school until he became repulsed by the specter of violent revolution, a shift precipitated by the unresolved murder of his friend Betty Van Patter in the mid 1970s. He thereafter became an apologist for Reagan, an extreme conservative, and now devotes his efforts towards mounting attacks on Muslims, liberals, and leftists in education and academia.

29.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism,” 11-12.

30.

↑

Brown, “Foreword,” To Die for the People. For more on this history, see United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations: Corporate Conduct and the Public Interest, ed. Khalil Hamdani and Lorraine Ruffing (Routledge, 2015).

31.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism,” 2.

32.

↑

John Narayan, “Huey P. Newton’s Intercommunalism: An Unacknowledged Theory of Empire,” Theory, Culture & Society 0.0 (Nov 27 2017), 1-29. Note especially fn. 6 for Narayan’s suggestions regarding the relationship between Newton’s conceptions and Immanuel Wallerstein’s as articulated in “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis” (1974).

33.

↑

John Narayan, “The Wages of Whiteness in the Absence of Wages: Racial Capitalism, Reactionary Intercommunalism and the Rise of Trumpism,” Third World Quarterly 38.11, Special Issue: Whatever Happened to the Idea of Imperialism? ed. Narayan and Sealey-Huggins (Routledge, Aug 2017), 2482-2500. Newton, as quoted by Narayan: “Here in America racism is rampant and we will have to do something about that… increasingly our objective class brothers act in a way, which will harm Black people, in other words they are subjectively our enemy. And I would use the hard-hat as an example. The hard-hats are exploited, they’re becoming seasonally employed in other words, they’re well on their way to becoming unemployables and instead of blaming their master, they blame us for it.” Narayan continues: “As the impact of reactionary intercommunalism took effect, and the wages of whiteness became ever absent, Newton believed that communities in the US would often ‘feel more and more that it’s a race contradiction rather that a class contradiction’,” (2487-2488).

34.

↑

Narayan, 21.

35.

↑

This essay, published in the The Huey P. Newton Reader, appears to be an edited excerpt from Newton’s original “Intercommunalism” (1974).

36.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974), 6.

37.

↑

“America’s Forever Wars,” The New York Times, Oct 22 2017. “Number of Military and DoD Appropriated Fund (APF) Civilian Personnel Permanently Assigned By Duty Location and Service/Component,” Defense Manpower Data Center, Mar 31 2018.

38.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism: A Higher Level of Consciousness,” Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Box 48, Folder 4, p. 9.

39.

↑

Horowitz as quoted by Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974), 12.

40.

↑

Newton, “Black Capitalism Re-Analyzed I: June 5, 1971,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 227.

41.

↑

Newton and Erikson, “Discussions with J. Herman Blake, Erik H. Erikson, Kai T. Erikson, and Huey P. Newton,” In Search of Common Ground, 103.

42.

↑

Newton, “Part Two,” Revolutionary Suicide, 53-98.

43.

↑

Newton, “Speech at Boston College: November 18, 1970,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 162-164.

44.

↑

Newton, “Speech at Boston College: November 18, 1970,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 163.

45.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism: February 1971,” The Huey P. Newton Reader.

46.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974), 32: “The Black Panther Party has chosen materialist assumptions on which to ground its ideology. This is a purely arbitrary choice. Idealism might be the real happening; we might not be here at all. We don’t really know whether we are in Connecticut or in San Francisco, whether we are dreaming and in a dream state, or just whether we are awake and in a dream state. Perhaps we are just somewhere in a void; we simply can’t be sure.” Newton’s skeptical speculations bear a strong similarity to Descartes’ three doubts in The Meditations: the possibility that his own senses may deceive him, the possibility that his experiences are simply part of a dream, and the possibility that he is awake but being deceived by an external force (Descartes’ evil demon). Newton follows that by suggesting a final possibility that resembles solipsism. For more on the Panthers turn to dialectical materialism, see Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974), 33.

47.

↑

Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 57-58: “The religious beliefs acquired in childhood also troubled me. After struggling through some of Socrates’ works, as well as those of Aristotle, Hume, and Descartes, I began to question what I had always taken for granted. The ideas in the philosophical works that Melvin was studying spilled over into my confused mind… I identified very strongly with Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because he went through a similar experience. He felt great guilt when he first questioned Catholicism, believing that he would consumed by the fires of hell for his doubt.” See also Chapters 8, 10, and 11 (“Moving On,” “Learning” and “The Brothers on the Block”) in Revolutionary Suicide.

48.

↑

See: Jeffries, “Newton’s View of People and the State,” Huey P. Newton: Radical Theorist, 42-52. Newton, “Revolutionary Suicide: The Way of Liberation,” Revolutionary Suicide, 1-6.

49.

↑

Robin D. G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans. ed. Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 126: “Shortly after his release from prison in August 1970, Newton proposed the creation of an ‘‘Ideological Institute’’ where participants actually read and taught what he regarded as the ‘‘classics’’—Marx, Mao, and Lenin as well as Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Unfortunately, the Ideological Institute did not amount to much; few Party members saw the use of abstract theorizing or the relevance of some of these writings to revolution.” For Newton, the intention was to redistribute and decentralize the work of producing Party theory away from himself (Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 323-324).

50.

↑

Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire, 312.

51.

↑

Fred Hampton, “Power Anywhere There’s People,” Speech Delivered Olivet Church, Chicago, 1969.

52.

↑

Newton, “Utopia: Universal Life Energy” (1974), Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Box 39, Folder 1. Newton read all four volumes of the then available Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung (Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 70). For more on the distinctly Maoist approach to dialectical materialism, see Mao Zedong’s “On Practice,” “On Contradiction,” and “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.”

53.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974), 52-53.

54.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974), 37.

55.

↑

Newton, “College and the Afro-American Association,” Revolutionary Suicide, 60-66.

56.

↑

Huey Newton, “To the Black Movement: May 15, 1968,” To Die For the People. Huey Newton, “To The Republic of New Africa: September 13, 1969,” To Die For the People.

57.

↑

In a manner similar to how the Nation of Islam and Moorish Science Temple had prior rejected the term “Negro” and instead took up the terms “Black” or “Afro-American,” many Panthers who joined the Black Liberation Army and Republic of New Afrika chose by 1968 to identify themselves as New Afrikan, designating a collective identity inclusive of the currently 180 million members of the formerly enslaved African diaspora in the Americas.

58.

↑

Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 70. The above quote is preceded by the following passage: “When I presented my solutions to the problems of Black people, or when I expressed my philosophy, people said, “Well, isn’t that socialism?” Some of them were using the socialist label to put me down, but I figured that if this was socialism, then socialism must be a correct view. So I read more of the works of the socialists and began to see a strong similarity between my beliefs and theirs. My conversion was complete when I read the four volumes of Mao Tse-tung to learn more about the Chinese Revolution.”

59.

↑

Huey P. Newton, “Huey Newton Talks to the Movement About the Black Panther Party, Cultural Nationalism, SNCC, Liberal sand White Revolutionaries,” The Black Panthers Speak, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Haymarket, 1970). Newton, “To the Black Movement: May 15, 1968,” To Die for the People. Also central to the BPP’s early Marxism and Maoism was the ideological leadership of LA-based Panther Ray “Masai” Hewitt (Bloom and Martin, “International Alliance,” Black Against Empire, 311-312).

60.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974). 38.

61.

↑

Newton, “To the Republic of New Africa: September 13, 1969,” To Die For the People. Newton, “On Pan-Africanism or Communism: December 1, 1972,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 253.

62.

↑

Newton, “Discussions with J. Herman Blake, Erik H. Erikson, Kai T. Erikson, and Huey P. Newton,” In Search of Common Ground, 135-136. In this discussion, Huey Newton narrates a series of examples that point to contradictions in how blackness and whiteness are constructed.

63.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974), 46.

64.

↑

Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots,” Nov 10 1963. “What is the difference between a black revolution and a Negro revolution? …The only revolution based on loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet; you can sit down next to white folks on the toilet. That’s no revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality. The white man knows what a revolution is. He knows that the black revolution is world-wide in scope and in nature. The black revolution is sweeping Asia, sweeping Africa, is rearing its head in Latin America. The Cuban Revolution — that’s a revolution. They overturned the system. Revolution is in Asia. Revolution is in Africa. And the white man is screaming because he sees revolution in Latin America. How do you think he’ll react to you when you learn what a real revolution is? You don’t know what a revolution is. If you did, you wouldn’t use that word.” James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs. “The City Is the Black Man’s Land” (1966), Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook (Monthly Review Press, 1970).

65.

↑

Elaine Brown, “Foreword,” To Die for the People, xx.

66.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974), 41.

67.

↑

Newton, “Utopia: Universal Life Energy,” 8-9. Newton continues, likely drawing from discussions from his visit to China in 1971, adding, “Because they have a worldview, they quickly agreed that they can only call themselves liberated territory because they said the world belongs to the people and they have a universal identity with all of the oppressed people of the world.” In “The Technology Question: 1972,” he also offers a more severe critique of the Soviet Union, which he says became a “satellite of the United States” when they formed the “United States-Soviet Union Trade Agreement of 1972” and also as a result harmed Third World resistance movements: “Russia’s first mistake came in the form of an incorrect analysis: that socialism could co-exist peacefully with capitalist nations” (The Huey P. Newton Reader, 259-265). For more of Newton’s criticisms of the Soviet Union, see also his critique of George Padmore’s Communism and Black Nationalism in “On Pan-Africanism or Communism: December 1, 1971,” The Huey P. Newton Reader.

68.

↑

Newton, “Reply to Roy Wilkins re : Vietnam: September 26, 1970,” To Die For the People.

69.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974), 54.

70.

↑

Newton, “The Technology Question: December 1, 1972,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 262-264.

71.

↑

As John Narayan points out (fn. 5), already by 1969, in writings published while he is still incarcerated, Newton is trying to rethink the relationship between race, colonization, and forms of empire: “At one time I thought that only Blacks were colonized. But I think we have to change our rhetoric to an extent because the whole American people have been colonized, if you view exploitation as a colonized effect. Seventy-six companies have exploited everyone. American people are a colonized people even more so than the people in developing countries where the military operates.” Newton, “On the Peace Movement: August 15, 1969,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 152. This point is articulated again one month later in Newton’s “To the Republic of New Africa: September 13, 1969” with regards to indigenous people, but even as far back as 1967 Newton insists on identifying the first waves of European immigrants, many of whom were poor, criminalized, and in bondage, as colonized people: “Now these same colonized White people, these bondsmen, paupers, and thieves, deny the colonized Black man not only the right to abolish this oppressive system, but to even speak of abolishing it.” Newton, “In Defense of Self Defense I: June 20, 1967,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 134-135.

72.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974), 49. See also, “Uniting Against a Common Enemy: October 23, 1971,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 234-236.

73.

↑

Eldridge Cleaver, “On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party (Part 1)” (1969). Newton affirms this thesis again during his “Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 18, 1970,” To Die for the People, 26.

74.

↑

Newton, “Intercommunalism: A Higher Level of Consciousness,” Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Box 48, Folder 4, p. 13. Newton, “In Defense of Self Defense I,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 135. Newton, “The Technology Question: 1972,” 264.

75.

↑

Newton, “Uniting Against a Common Enemy: October 13, 1971,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 239-240.

76.

↑

For a starting point on the history of the Black Liberation Army, especially as based on the East Coast, see Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and their Legacy, ed. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001). For more on guerrilla struggles in the Midwest, see Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazerow’s Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party (Duke University Press, 2008). I also have material forthcoming on the Black Liberation Army.

77.

↑

Newton, “Speech at Boston College: November 18, 1970,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 160.

78.

↑

For more on the BPP’s focus on the home, the school, and the commune as a site of struggle, see: Kiran Garcha, “Bringing the Vanguard Home: Revisiting the Black Panther Party’s Sites of Class Struggle,” Viewpoint Magazine (Oct 31 2015).

79.

↑

Huey Newton, “Black Capitalism Re-Analyzed I: June 5, 1971,” The Huey P. Newton Reader.

80.

↑

Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth trans. Constance Farrington (Grove Press, 1963).

81.

↑

From Newton’s “Speech at Boston College: November 18, 1970,” 166: “In this country the Black Panther Party, taking careful note of the dialectical method, taking careful note of the social trends and the ever-changing nature of things, sees that while the lumpen proletarians are the minority and the proletarians are the majority, technology is developing at such a rapid rate that automation will progress to cybernation, and cybernation probably to technocracy.” For more on the historical debates concerning automation and “technocratic society” within the communist and Black left, from Alex Bogdanov to Martin Luther King Jr, I highly recommend R.L.’s forthcoming “Communisation: Dystopian or Scientific.” It is also important though to consider here the alternate argument that automation is less a cause of increasing underemployment than a symptom of the greater structural crisis within capitalism and what Marx identified as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. For more on this, see Aaron Benanav’s “Automation and the Future of Work.”

82.

↑

Newton, “Speech at Boston College: November 18, 1970,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 167

83.

↑

Ibid, 29.

84.

↑

Michel Foucault, “Lecture 11”, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, trans. Robert Hurley (Picador, 1992). See also: Mbembe, Achille (2003). “Necropolitics,” Public Culture. 15.1, 11–40.

85.

↑

Clayborne Carson, Malcolm X: The FBI File (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 1991).

86.

↑

Newton, “On The Relevance of the Church: May 19, 1971,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 219.

87.

↑

Newton, “A Functional Definition of Politics: January 11, 1969,” The Huey P. Newton Reader. Huey P. Newton, “A Functional Definition of Politics: Conclusion,” Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Box 50, Folder 2. Mao Zedong, “On Protracted War,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung Vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 153. For more on the genealogy, import, and influence of Newton’s conception of politics, see Brady Thomas Heiner’s “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 11.3 (2007). Newton, “Utopia: Universal Life Energy,” 10.

88.

↑

For more on the the debates around this matter, see Sakellaropoulos and Sotiris’ “From Territorial to Nonterritorial Capitalist Imperialism: Lenin and the Possibility of a Marxist Theory of Imperialism” (in Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, Jan 2017). Increasingly through the 1970s, Newton’s analysis of capitalist imperialism seems to echo a close reading of Lenin’s stance, including its many vacillations. Discussing the struggle to establish “liberated territories” in Vietnam, Newton states: “…the United States does not need their territory. That is not the question. The people of the oppressed territories might fight on the land question and die over the land question. But for the United States, it is the technology question, and the consumption of the goods that the technology produces!” (Newton, “The Technology Question: 1972,” 259-260). Another point to acknowledge here is that, by 1974, Newton’s his heavy citation of David Horowitz seems to also indicate a shift in position away from the view that capitalist imperialist expansion is caused primarily by the capitalist’s need to find a consumer base and instead is caused by the inherent tendency of capitalist dynamics towards both the elimination of competitors and the creation of economic dependence for all social ecosystems that it comes into contact with: “The notion that excess savings or a deficiency of investment demand in domestic markets (in classical Marxist terms-the difficulty of “realizing surplus value”) is the mechanism that drives capitalists abroad and makes imperialist expansion indispensable to capitalism generally is one properly associated with Rosa Luxemburg and the liberal J.A. Hobson, but explicitly repudiated by Lenin and other Bolshevik theorists. This is a fundamental point, for the Hobsonian thesis, as a theory of the general phenomenon of imperialist expansion, can be faulted on empirical grounds and then used, as it has been, to discredit the economic theory of imperialism as such. It is not possible to argue, of course, that the insufficiency of domestic markets and the problem of disposing of surplus capital play no role or even and insignificant one in producing the phenomenon of imperialist expansion. Indeed, in the events of the turn of the century, it is recognized even by critics to have been a very important factor, while its place in the ideological perspective of the imperialists themselves often give it a greater weight and significance than its objective reality may warrant. But to identify it as the fundamental cause of the general expansionist drive of capitalism is both empirically unjustified and theoretically wrong headed. …At the most basic level, therefore, imperialism is capitalism which has burst the boundaries of the nation state even as it first overcome the seclusion of the village community of the feudal epoch. It follows from this that the two phenomena are inseparable: there can be no end to imperialism without an end to capitalism and capitalist relations of production.” (Newton citing Horowitz, 8-10, “Intercommunalism,” 1974). The extent of my engagement with these questions is fully indebted to discussions with and the guidance of Viewpoint editor Ben Mabie. For more, see Viewpoint’s Issue 6: Imperialism.

89.

↑

Narayan offers what appears to be a largely compatible interpretation, arguing that the BPP’s “survival pending revolution” could be described as a shift to a Gramscian “war of position.”

90.

↑

Joy Ann Williamson, “Community Control With a Black Nationalist Twist: The Black Panther Party’s Educational Programs,” Counterpoints, 237 (2005).

91.

↑

Spencer, The Revolution Has Come, 120. Huey P. Newton, “On The Relevance of the Church: May 19, 1971,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 229. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come, 153. Robert O. Self, American Babylon Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton University Press, 2005).

92.

↑

Huey P. Newton, “Black Capitalism Re-Analyzed I: June, 5, 1971,” “Black Capitalism Re-Analyzed II (Practical Application): August 9, 1971,” “On The Relevance of the Church: May 19, 1971,” The Huey P. Newton Reader. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come, 118.

93.

↑

Spencer, The Revolution Has Come, 149, 123-132

94.

↑

Jeffries, Huey P. Newton: Radical Theorist. 9. See also Flores A. Forbes’ Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party and David Hilliard’s This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard.

95.

↑

Newton, “Black Capitalism Reanalyzed I,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 232-233. “There is no salvation in capitalism, but through this new approach, the Black capitalist will contribute to his own negation by helping to build a strong political vehicle which is guided by revolutionary concepts and serves as a vanguard for the people… So we will heighten the contradiction between the Black community and corporate capitalism, while at the same time reducing the contradiction between the Black capitalist and the Black community.”

96.

↑

Erikson and Newton, In Search of Common Ground, 39.

97.

↑

Spencer, The Revolution Has Come, 145-146.

98.

↑

Spencer, The Revolution Has Come, 147.

99.

↑

Lenin, V.I. “The Dual Power,” Pravda, 28 (April 9, 1917). Lee Lockwood, “Interview: Huey Newton,” Playboy, 20.5 (Playboy, 1973), 75.

100.

↑

Newton, “On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party and the Defection of the Black Panther Party from the Black Community,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 205. It is also worth clarifying that the aims behind this campaign differed sharply from those motivating the 1968 Presidential campaign of Eldridge Cleaver under the People’s Freedom Party ticket. That prior campaign was clearly and explicitly aimed at acquiring publicity for the Party and its program on a national scale rather than the actual acquisition of political office. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come, 147-156.

101.

↑

Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 97-99.

102.

↑

In 1973, Newton explicitly says that Party members “live in communes” (Lee Lockwood, “Interview: Huey Newton”). The most extensive discussion of this history is found in Robyn Spencer’s invaluable “Communalism and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California,” West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, ed. Iaian Boal, (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 92-121. As far as I am aware, Newton’s published remarks on other communes of the 1960s are mostly limited to a critique of shortsighted or idealistic attempts to ‘disconnect’ from the impacts of expanding technology under capitalism. For these brief comments, see 116-117 in In Search of Common Ground.

103.

↑

Spencer, The Revolution Has Come, 114-177. See also Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (First Anchor Books: 1994).

104.

↑

Newton, “On the Relevance of Church: May 19, 1971,” To Die for the People, 66. Newton here actually uses the word “exploit” but puts the term in quotation marks, denoting a euphemistic use. In practice, however, this is arguably exactly what happened, as members faced labor quotas that only intensified as the Party increasingly struggled financially in the late 1970s. See also: Spencer, The Revolution Has Come, 195-201.

105.

↑

Newton, To Die for the People, 1.

106.

↑

Presciently, Newton also warned in his writings of the dangers of “revolutionary” parties becoming disconnected from reality and from the people, becoming subcultural affinity groups composed of “people who withdraw,” a tendency that Newton identified as “revolutionary cultism (Newton, “On the Relevance of the Church: May 19, 1971,” The Huey P. Newton Reader, 221-222). At the same time, it is necessary to consider that arguably all political movements, and perhaps all human social formations, rely on some level of control—either physical or psychological—to maintain the level of intragroup cohesion needed to achieve collective goals. Indeed, it seems that the less physically coercive a group’s internal dynamics are, the more likely that particularly powerful—even if subtle—intragroup ideological mechanisms overlap with “structures of feeling” and internal cultural homogeneity to ensure submissive behavior. Often, this seems to be the case despite the presence of rhetoric about anti-hierarchical, democratic, or collectivist decision-making. Anthropologist Harold Barclay’s notion of “diffuse sanctions” is useful here for speculating on the ways that decentralized forms of authority arise as a form of social control within largely egalitarian communities (People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy, 1982). Since the 1970s, as group cohesion in the U.S. has apparently become increasingly harder to come by (see Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community), most of the few social-political formations with any degree of autonomy from the state that have persisted until the present day indeed appear to be some of the most internally coercive, such as with gangs and cults. That is, I am not sure that the late BPP’s cult-like dynamics are best understood as dysfunction, but rather perhaps as structurally predetermined by what autonomous social organization may be inclined to look like under ‘globalization’ or “reactionary intercommunalism.” This does not mean that individuals cannot organize themselves and successfully develop forms of group cohesion with less coercive dynamics, but rather perhaps that contemporary material conditions are making groups with less coercive practices more difficult to sustain without a high degree of intentionality going into their formation. Crucially, of course, the most structurally significant political goals (however it is that they are decided upon) can only be attained through collective struggle.

107.

↑

Newton, “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements: August 15, 1970,” The Huey P. Newton Reader. Newton, “Loving,” Revolutionary Suicide, 93-98. Tracye Matthews, “No one ever asks what a Man’s Place in The Revolution Is: Gender and the Politics of the Black Panther Party 1966-1971,” The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998).

108.

↑

The severe impact of the state’s efforts to destroy Newton psychologically are profoundly underestimated. For a close treatment of this, see: Joe Street, “The Shadow of the Soul Breaker: Solitary Confinement, Cocaine, and the Disintegration of Huey P. Newton,” Pacific Historical Review, 84.3 Aug 2015, 333-363.

109.

↑

Huey P. Newton, “On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party and the Defection of the Black Panther Party from the Black Community: April 17, 1971,” The Huey P. Newton Reader.

110.

↑

Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire. Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazerow, Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party. Russell Maroon Shoatz. Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz (PM Press, 2013).

111.

↑

Newton, “Utopia: Universal Life Energy,” 10.

112.

↑

Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya. Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi (Daraja Press, 2017).

113.

↑

Robin D. G. Kelley, “Coates and West in Jackson,” Boston Review, Dec 22, 2017.

114.

↑

Brown, “Foreword,” xx.

115.

↑

David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (Oxford University Press, 2015), 180-188.

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: The Black Panther Party Was Co-founded 60 Years Ago Today on October 15, 1966 by Bobby Seale (b. 1936) and Huey P. Newton (1942-1989) in Oakland, California. This Is Their Original 10 Point Program

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:15:09 +0000

https://marydgraham.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/1966-the-black-panther-party-ten-point-program-e280a2.pdf

https://files.libcom.org/files/WATP.pdf

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/1966/10/15.htm

The Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party (Originally named the Black Panther Party for Self Defense)

Co-founded on October 15, 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale

PHOTO (L-R): BOBBY SEALE AND HUEY P. NEWTON IN 1967

PHOTO (L-R): BOBBY SEALE AND HUEY P. NEWTON IN 1970 AT BLACK PANTHER HEADQUARTERS IN OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

WE WANT FREEDOM. WE WANT POWER TO DETERMINE THE DESTINY OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES.

We believe that Black and oppressed people will not be free until we are able to determine our destinies in our own communities ourselves, by fully controlling all the institutions which exist in our communities.

WE WANT FULL EMPLOYMENT FOR OUR PEOPLE.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every person employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the American businessmen will not give full employment, then the technology and means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

WE WANT AN END TO THE ROBBERY BY THE CAPITALISTS OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of our fifty million Black people. Therefore, we feel this is a modest demand that we make.

WE WANT DECENT HOUSING, FIT FOR THE SHELTER OF HUMAN BEINGS.

We believe that if the landlords will not give decent housing to our Black and oppressed communities, then housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that the people in our communities, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for the people.

WE WANT DECENT EDUCATION FOR OUR PEOPLE THAT EXPOSES THE TRUE NATURE OF THIS DECADENT AMERICAN SOCIETY. WE WANT EDUCATION THAT TEACHES US OUR TRUE HISTORY AND OUR ROLE IN THE PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of the self. If you do not have knowledge of yourself and your position in the society and in the world, then you will have little chance to know anything else.

WE WANT COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR All BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE.

We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventive medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give all Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide our selves with proper medical attention and care.

WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE, OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR, All OPPRESSED PEOPLE INSIDE THE UNITED STATES.

We believe that the racist and fascist government of the United States uses its domestic enforcement agencies to carry out its program of oppression against black people, other people of color and poor people inside the United States. We believe it is our right, therefore, to defend ourselves against such armed forces and that all Black and oppressed people should be armed for self defense of our homes and communities against these fascist police forces.

WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO ALL WARS OF AGGRESSION.

We believe that the various conflicts which exist around the world stem directly from the aggressive desire of the United States ruling circle and government to force its domination upon the oppressed people of the world. We believe that if the United States government or its lackeys do not cease these aggressive wars it is the right of the people to defend themselves by any means necessary against their aggressors.

WE WANT FREEDOM FOR ALL BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE NOW HELD IN U. S. FEDERAL, STATE, COUNTY, CITY AND MILITARY PRISONS AND JAILS. WE WANT TRIALS BY A JURY OF PEERS FOR All PERSONS CHARGED WITH SO-CALLED CRIMES UNDER THE LAWS OF THIS COUNTRY.

We believe that the many Black and poor oppressed people now held in United States prisons and jails have not received fair and impartial trials under a racist and fascist judicial system and should be free from incarceration. We believe in the ultimate elimination of all wretched, inhuman penal institutions, because the masses of men and women imprisoned inside the United States or by the United States military are the victims of oppressive conditions which are the real cause of their imprisonment. We believe that when persons are brought to trial they must be guaranteed, by the United States, juries of their peers, attorneys of their choice and freedom from imprisonment while awaiting trial.

WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, PEACE AND PEOPLE'S COMMUNITY CONTROL OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY.

"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. ...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are most disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security…" --Declaration of Independence

VIDEO:
https://vimeo.com/107315452?autoplay=1&muted=1&stream

THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY: OAKLAND AND CHICAGO

SchomburgCBFS

SEPTEMBER 26, 2014

Dr. Murch is an associate professor of History at Rutgers University in the School of Arts and Sciences. Her interests include the urban history of California and New York; Civil Rights, Black Power and postwar social movements; history of policing and prisons; and the political economy of drugs. Currently, she is researching the postwar history of the Bronx and completing a new book on youth culture and underground economy. She is also the author of Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, University of North Carolina Press, October 2010.

Dr. Williams was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. He received his B.A> in History and minor in Black American Studies from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (2000). He earned both his M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA (2002) and Ph.D. in History from UCLA (2008). His research interests centered on questions of resistance and the social justice revolutions found within the historic African American community. His most recent book is, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago.

Dr. Spencer is a professor of African American History at Lehman College. She also taught African and African American Studies andHistory at Penn State University from 2001-2007. Before that, she was a Visiting Predoctoral Fellow at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her areas of interest include black social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. She is the author of Mad at History, and is currently completing a book about the Black Panther Party.

https://www.rollingstone.com/…/18-docs-to-help-explain-tod…/

Home
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Movie Features

Fight the Power: 18 Docs to Help Explain Today’s Unrest

From primers on the Black Panther Party to a look at a police department attempting to purge its precinct of systematic violence

by David Fear, Tim Grierson, and Maria Fontoura
June 4, 2020
Rolling Stone

PHOTO: (Left to right): Angela Davis, James Baldwin, and Fred Hampton. IFC Films, Bob Adelman/Magnolia Pictures; Everett Collection/Shutterstock

"...The first step is understanding and compassion. And for decades, documentaries have been a prime source in terms of detailing the numerous battles African Americans have waged in the U.S. — for basic human rights, freedom and justice to simply staying alive — from almost every angle imaginable..."

The 18 nonfiction movies we’re listing below cover a large spectrum — from a primer on the Black Panthers to one white filmmaker’s attempt to wrestle with his ancestral racism to a look at the Oakland Police Department’s attempts at purging itself of institutional racism. (The Frontline doc Killer Mike mentioned is in here, too.) We agree that “film lists are lazy substitutes for action”; simply watching movies is not going to fix the litany of problems and historical prejudices that have led to people taking to the streets and saying, “Enough.” But our hope is the following titles will not only contextualize why what’s happening now is necessary, but will also spur people to action — a sort of “we don’t know who needs to hear this, but…” compendium of history lessons and portraits to help inform and inspire.

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015)

Renowned documentarian Stanley Nelson captures the late-Sixties atmosphere that birthed the Black Panther Party, and, through interviews with founding members, traces its evolution from a grassroots community organization in Oakland to a global network deemed a terroristic threat by the FBI. For anyone who denies systemic racism in law enforcement, the film’s exposure of the bureau’s campaign to “neutralize black nationals” should settle that matter. And for anyone whose conception of the Panthers is a group of extremists, many of their demands will sound shockingly mundane now: “decent housing; education; an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.” MF

The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975 (2011)

In 1967, a Swedish TV news crew traveled to America to “show the country as it really is” — which included documenting the growing Black Power movement and giving its leaders a stage on which to rage. Goran Olsson’s extraordinary compilation of footage from their eight-year tenure captures the highs and lows of the moment and the struggle but, more importantly, offers a counterpoint to how the U.S. media was covering figureheads like Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis. You couldn’t ask for a more pertinent time capsule of a turbulent era. DF (Amazon Prime, IFC Films Unlimited)

The Central Park Five (2012)

Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s meticulous examination of the Central Park Five case doubles as an indictment of New York’s feverish political climate at the time, which provoked prosecutors to cut corners in order to get faster convictions. This is a quietly furious reminder of Citizen Trump’s inherent racism (he took out newspaper ads demanding the five youths get the death penalty) and the ways that the police callously profile people of color, assuming guilt before innocence. TG (Amazon Prime)

A Class Divided (1985)

When Stephen Colbert asked recent guest Killer Mike what white people could do to be better allies, the rapper replied: “Spend an hour watching Jane Elliott.” This Frontline episode covers the diversity educator’s famous experiment, conducted in her third-grade classroom the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, that exposes how easy it is to implant and propagate prejudice. Elliott divides her class by blue-eyed and brown-eyed students, labeling the former superior and the latter inferior. Watching the children take to their roles — one group dominant and ebullient, the other submissive and dejected — is eye-opening and never less than heartbreaking. MF (YouTube)

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (2017)

“In 1946, my great-grandfather murdered a black man named Bill Spann and got away with it.” Travis Wilkerson’s personal-essay film grapples with the guilt of that crime, as the director’s whiteness forces him to confront his family’s very tangible contribution to racial injustice in America. Inspired by George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin, Wilkerson contemplates the bigots at his own dinner table, and his struggles to in some small way pay reparations for his ancestor’s sin. White Americans have been, and continue to be, complicit in our country’s shameful mistreatment of people of color. We should all take a page out Wilkerson’s book. TG (Amazon Prime)

4 Little Girls (1997)

Spike Lee’s chronicle of the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama, church that took the lives of Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14), Cynthia Wesley (14) and Denise McNair (11), is a forensic account of a chilling domestic terrorist act, from first-person testimonies about the victims and the incident itself to the eventual conviction of the man responsible, Robert Chambliss. But it’s also a penetrating look at what was going on in the city where it happened, the bigotry that fueled it, and the community that mourned their loss. (Also highly recommended: Lee’s blistering look at Hurricane Katrina and its effect on NOLA’s African-American community, When the Levees Broke.) DF (Amazon Prime, YouTube, HBO Max)

The Force (2017)

Peter Nicks’ immersive documentary takes us inside the Oakland Police Department, which had been under federal oversight for more than a decade because of rampant misconduct and civil rights violations. Embedded within the embattled department, the filmmaker captures a tough-but-optimistic new chief, Sean Whent, who’s determined to turn the OPD around. From cadet training to tense altercations on the street, the film dispassionately illustrates the dangers that cops face. Yet viewers also leave with a despondent recognition that institutional racism can’t be swept away overnight, and this is a broken system with no easy fixes. Don’t expect a happy ending. TG (Netflix, Kino Now)

Free Angela & All Political Prisoners (2012)

As in Angela Davis, the activist who went from being a college professor and early booster for the Black Panthers to a fugitive and, per the title, a political prisoner of the state. Filmmaker Shola Lynch lets Davis speak about her life and times in her own words; it’s an excellent introduction (should one be needed) to a crucial figure of the movement. DF (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)

I Am Not Your Negro (2016)

This inspiring, Oscar-nominated look at James Baldwin, who loved America enough to constantly criticize her, was a longtime passion project for filmmaker Raoul Peck, who was allowed rare access to the late author’s archives. With Samuel L. Jackson delivering a powerfully mournful voiceover of Baldwin’s words, I Am Not Your Negro illustrates how America promotes bigotry through its laws, customs, even its pop culture. The film is an eloquent tribute to Baldwin and a fiery condemnation of a country he accurately claimed never lived up to its ideals. TG (Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube)

The Interrupters (2011)

Hoop Dreams co-director Steve James highlights a handful of Chicago’s Violence Interrupters who intercede in the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, hoping to dial down the violence they themselves once helped perpetuate. A story of redemption that resists phony uplift — James is clear-eyed about the systemic causes for violence, poverty and addiction — this doc boasts a remarkable intimacy as we watch the hard work that goes into improving lives that the system left behind. TG (Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube)

L.A. ’92 (2017)

Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s assemblage of archival footage retraces the steps that led from Rodney King’s beating to a national emergency. The smug looks on the faces of the cops, shop owners carrying guns, motorists being dragged from their cars, King’s tearful plea for peace and the City of Angels going up in flames — almost 30 years later, none of these images have lost their power to shock. It’s a portrait of systematic racism pushing people to the boiling point. It looks all too familiar right now. DF (Amazon Prime)

Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992 (2017)

Starting with the police-chokehold death of James Mincey Jr. and ending with convictions stemming from the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict, filmmaker John Ridley does a deep dive on a decade of violence — from the LAPD against African-American citizens, from questionable tactics used to combat gang warfare, from two caught-on-tape incidents and from the collateral damage that followed. What makes his history lesson so compelling and unique is the mosaic of voices he includes in laying all the cause-and-effect out, including numerous ex-cops, Korean shop owners, community members who’ve suffered, and even members of the L.A. 4. A stunning achievement. DF (Amazon Prime, iTunes)

Let the Fire Burn (2013)

The 1985 killing of 11 Black Philadelphians by local police is immortalized in Jason Osder’s extraordinary film, which reconstructs the horrors of May 13th through news footage and subsequent commission testimony. Unspooling like a procedural, the film lets us see cops clash with MOVE, a Black liberation group that was forcibly removed from its compound, and how the stand-off led to widespread fires that consumed a city block. It’s a stunningly organized rundown of exactly how this badly mismanaged tragedy occurred — and why the stain of those deaths still lingers 35 years later. TG (iTunes, Vudu)

The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971)

In the early hours of the morning of December 4th, 1969, a 21-year-old named Fred Hampton, was shot to death by police who’d busted into his Chicago apartment. He was a high-ranking official in chairman of the Black Panther Party. The cops claimed that they had been fired upon; the investigation that followed contradicted that notion at almost every turn. Howard Alk’s portrait of a political assassination doesn’t flinch in terms of showing the bloodied crime scene or listening to heartbreaking testimonies from people in the room when it happened. Yet the movie is also a tribute to Hampton as an activist in action, seen here organizing community programs and spreading the word about the need for freedom from oppression. Hamtpon wasn’t just a martyr. He was also a revolutionary. DF (Amazon Prime)

Strong Island (2017)

For more than two decades, filmmaker Yance Ford lived with the agony of his brother William’s 1992 death at the hand of a white mechanic., The latter claimed he shot him in self-defense; a grand jury agreed. Strong Island both recounts the events that led to William’s murder and explores the many ways that Yance and his family were destroyed by the criminal justice system’s mishandling of the case. This is a personal portrait of raw pain — and a bigger-picture look at the anguish of so many Black families crying out to a society deaf to their plight. TG (Netflix)

13th (2016)

Ava DuVernay shines a much-needed light on what has become, per the title of Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, “the new Jim Crow” — the mass incarceration of African-Americans. Using the 13th Amendment (the abolition of slavery) as a starting point, this look at our nation’s skewed, screwed-up judicial system irises out to view how larger social factors that have contributed to an ongoing “mythology of black criminality” and a massively disproportionate number of black citizens being behind bars. Sobering, scathing, essential. DF (Netflix, YouTube)

What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (2018)

Italian filmmaker Roberto Minervini traveled to New Orleans for this incisive glimpse into a series of ordinary Black lives. We hear stories of drug addiction, sexual abuse, random violence and organized resistance that collectively illustrate the insidious ways that racism visit these individuals on a regular basis, leaving them with few good options. What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? culminates with a powerful street protest, proving as prophetic of our current reality as the film’s provocative title. TG (Amazon Prime, YouTube)

Whose Streets? (2017)

Six years before tens of thousands of people across the globe would protest police brutality in the name of George Floyd, a small group of impassioned activists did it in Ferguson, Missouri, in the name of Michael Brown, another unarmed black man killed by a white officer. While mainstream media broadcasts at the time focused on isolated rioting, this guerrilla-style doc takes you inside the unrest from the demonstrators’ perspective. In wrenching footage, a devastated community repeatedly gathers to grieve and plead for justice, and is repeatedly met with armored vehicles, dogs, flash-bombs, and tear gas. A civics lesson you won’t find in any textbook. MF (Amazon Prime, YouTube)

In This Article: ava duvernay, Black Panther, Documentary, George Floyd Protests, James Baldwin, Spike Lee

PHOTO: (Left to right): Angela Davis, James Baldwin, and Fred Hampton. IFC Films, Bob Adelman/Magnolia Pictures; Everett Collection/

Shutterstock

Left to right: Angela Davis, James Baldwin, and Fred Hampton

IMPORTANT NEW BOOK:

Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party
Edited by Diane Fujino and Matef Harmachis
Haymarket Books, 2020

[Publication date: October 13, 2020]

The first book to comprehensively examine how the Black Panther Party has directly shaped the practices and ideas that have animated grassroots activism in the decades since its decline, Black Power Afterlives represents a major scholarly achievement as well as an important resource for today's activists. Through its focus on the enduring impact of the Black Panther Party, this volume expands the historiography of Black Power studies beyond the 1960s-70s and serves as a bridge between studies of the BPP during its organizational existence and studies of present-day Black activism, allowing today's readers and organizers to situate themselves in a long lineage of liberation movements.

REVIEWS:

“What Fujino and Harmachis have done with this collection of articles is comparable in scope to Charles Jones’ The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), and Judson Jeffries’ Comrades, both superb and deeply critical anthologies, but with a provocative twist: what would be the historical impacts of the Black Panther Party half a century hence? As a young member of the original collective, I can say without contradiction, we were so busy, and often so nerve-wracked that we barely thought about the next 50 minutes, much less 50 years! Fujino and Harmachis show us that history is never done. It runs like a river, sometimes rushing, sometimes meandering, but always moving.” —Mumia Abu-Jamal, author of We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party

“Black Power Afterlives constructs an urgently needed bridge between the Black Power era and the Black Lives Matter movements of today. Deftly side stepping well-trod ground, authors trace how the Panthers' international engagements, artistic practices, ideological frameworks and community organizing have continued to influence new generations of activists. By locating the Panthers' richest legacies in the work of students, poor Black folks and Black queer feminists and in the sustained commitment of political prisoners, it reminds readers of the transformative possibilities of struggle.” —Robyn C. Spencer, author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panthers Party in Oakland

“The Black Panther Party’s 1966 armed actions against police brutality in Oakland’s black community reorganized mainstream consciousness in the US. The BPP exposed entrenched notions of gun-ownership as the exclusive right of white Americans. The Party’s armed cop-watch, aesthetic exaltation of blackness, and challenges to capitalism also released black resistance from the state’s ideological grip. Black Power Afterlives is the first book to explore this post-60s reorganization of black consciousness, resistance and humanity. Its intervention is as urgent and rich as the legacy of the Black Panthers.” —Johanna Fernández, author of The Young Lords: A Radical History

“Black Power Afterlives gives us concrete insights into the continuing significance of the Black Panthers without the common iconization and stereotypes. Through carefully chosen writings and interviews we are reminded of the transformative power of movements and real people that envision a far more just and equitable future for humanity and the planet.” —Claude Marks, director, The Freedom Archives

“The vivid, engaging, and compelling testimonies that Diane C. Fujino and Matef Harmachis have collected in Black Power Afterlives offer unparalleled insights about the origins, evolution, and continuing influence and impact of the Black Panther Party. This is an indispensable book, one that demonstrates how oppositional social movement organizations fuel future struggles long after they seem to have departed from the scene.” —George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

“Tender and determined, these meditations on the enduring afterlives of the Black Panther Party illuminate the incandescent dreams of freedom joining one revolutionary generation to another. The essays and conversations—on art and prison, ecology and the spirit—focus on the lessons rank-and-file Panthers have to offer today's rank and file. They remind us of the eternal dedication and determination required of us all.” —Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era

“Black Power Afterlives shares important insights about the Black Panther Party and radical activism. Examining an inheritance that bridges two centuries, it explores mobilizations against poverty, exploitation, imprisonment, violence and war. Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalitions sought to wrest victories from police in order to secure "Power to the People." With prescience, Hampton warned that he would not die slipping on icy Chicago streets, and that we either organize with radical intent or forget him. Black Power Afterlives remembers Fred and the sacrifices of those who fought and fight for their communities—especially political prisoners. Recognizing the need to free them all, and our communities, Black Power Afterlives builds an archive and a foundation for continued struggles.” —Joy James, author of Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics

“There are more stories of the deep and continuing legacy of the Black Panthers than can be contained in any one book, but Black Panther Afterlives does a good job at beginning to fill the gap. Editors Fujino and Harmachis present us with a must-read book, essential to a true understanding of the positive ways in which Panther politics can and do enrich our lives today.” —Matt Meyer, secretary-general, International Peace Research Association; co-editor and author, Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st Century Revolutions

ABOUT THE EDITORS:

Diane C. Fujino is an activist-scholar teaching and writing about Asian American radical struggles, Black Power struggles, and Afro-Asian solidarities and is professor of Asian American Studies and former director of the Center for Black Studies Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Fujino has long participated in political prisoner, education, and US Third World liberation solidarity struggles and is active with the Ethnic Studies Now! Santa Barbara Coalition. She is author of Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (2005) and Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life (2012); and editor of Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader (2009).

Matef Harmachis is a social scientist teaching high school, a former journalist, and a long-time activist working in pan-African and Third World decolonization solidarity, education, labor, and political prisoner liberation movements. He is active with the Ethnic Studies Now! Santa Barbara Coalition, which recently won the passage of an ethnic studies course requirement for high school graduation in the Santa Barbara school district.

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/black-panther/index.htm

The Black Panther Newspaper

The Black Panther was the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party. It began as a four-page newsletter in Oakland, California, in 1967, and was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. It was the main publication of the party and was soon sold in several large cities across the United States, as well as having an international readership.

The newspaper distributed information about the party's activities, and expressed through articles the ideology of the Black Panther Party, focusing on both international revolutions as inspiration and contemporary racial struggles of African Americans across the United States.

The Black Panther Party maintained a commitment to community service including various "survival programs" developed by individual chapters that, by 1969, became part of the national party's "serve the people program" to connect their commitments to basic social services with community organizing and consciousness raising. The Black Panther Party's Intercommunal News Service published The Black Panther Party Newspaper as a critical part of its consciousness raising program.

The Black Panther Party Newspaper is also known as The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, Black Panther Black Community News Service, and Black Community News Service, was published by the Black Panther Party from 1967 to 1980. The newspaper was most popular from 1968-1972, and during this time sold a hundred thousand copies a week.

An undergraduate student at San Francisco State, Judy Juanita, served as editor at The Black Panther Party Newspaper during the later 1960s. In 1969, two-thirds of Black Panther Party members were women.

In its later years it was used to rally support for members of the party who became political prisoners.

"The BPP newspaper grew from a four-page newsletter to a full newspaper in about a year and [537] issues were printed".

Circulation was national and international. From 1968 to 1971, The Black Panther Party Newspaper was the most widely read Black newspaper in the United States, with a weekly circulation of more than 300,000. It sold for 25 cents. Every Panther was required to read and study the newspaper before they could sell it. As it became nationally circulated, The Black Panther Party Newspaper national distribution center was located in San Francisco, with a distribution team led by Andrew Austin, Sam Napier, and Ellis White. Other distribution centers were in Chicago, Kansas, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle.

The copies of The Black Panther collected here were made publically available here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/4m7axa/a_complete_archive_of_the_black_panther_partys/

In 1968 a copyright symbol started to appear on the masthead of The Black Panther. In investigating this copyright it appears to have gone into irrelevancy as newspapers were subsequently filed with regards to the ownership of the copyright with the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress. The Marxists Internet Archive will assume it has fallen into the Public Domain. We welcome any discussion of the legality of this. Please contact us.

For text file of the missing issues, please click here

Black Panther: Volume 1, 1967

Vol. 1, No. 1, April 25, 1967

Vol. 1, No. 2, May 15, 1967

Vol. 1, No. 3, June 20, 1967

Vol. 1, No. 4, July 3, 1967

Vol. 1, No. 5, July 20, 1967

Vol. 1, No. 6, November 23, 1967

Black Panther: Volume 2, 1968-1969

Vol. 2, No. 2, May 4, 1968

Vol. 2, No. 3, May 18, 1968

Vol. 2, No. 5, September 7, 1968

Vol. 2, No. 6, September 14, 1968

Vol. 2, No. 7, September 28, 1968

Vol. 2, No. 8, October 5, 1968

Vol. 2, No. 9, October 12, 1968

Vol. 2, No. 9, October 19, 1968

Vol. 2, No. 10, October 26, 1968

Vol. 2, No. 11, November 2, 1968

Vol. 2, Nos. 12-14, November 16, 1968

Vol. 2, Nos. 15-17, December 7, 1968

Vol. 2, No. 18, December 21, 1968

Vol. 2, No. 19, January 4, 1969

Vol. 2, No. 20, January 15, 1969

Vol. 2, No. 21, January 25, 1969

Vol. 2, No. 22, February 2, 1969

Vol. 2, No. 23, February 17, 1969

Vol. 2, No. 24, March 3, 1969

Vol. 2, No. 25, March 9, 1969

Vol. 2, No. 26, March 16, 1969

Vol. 2, No. 27, March 23, 1969

Vol. 2, No. 28, March 31, 1969

Vol. 2, No. 29, April 6, 1969

Vol. 2, No. 30, April 20, 1969

Black Panther: Volume 3, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 1, April 27, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 2, May 4, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 3, May 11, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 4, May 19, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 5, May 25, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 6, May 31, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 7, June 7, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 8, June 14, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 9, June 21, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 10, June 28, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 11, July 5, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 12, July 12, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 13, July 19, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 14, , 1969

Vol. 3, No. 15, August 2, 1969 (issue no printed on paper is incorrect)

Vol. 3, No. 16, August 9, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 17, August 16, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 19, August 30, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 20, September 6, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 21, September 13, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 22, September 20, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 23, September 27, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 24, October 4, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 25, October 11, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 26, October 18, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 27, October 25, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 28, November 1, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 29, November 8, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 30, November 15, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 31, November 22, 1969

Vol. 3, No. 33, November 29, 1969

Black Panther: Volume 4, 1969-1970

Vol. 4, No. 1, December 6, 1969

Vol. 4, No. 2, December 13, 1969

Vol. 4, No. 3, July 25, 1970 (issue no o. printed on paper is incorrect)

Vol. 4, No. 4, December 27, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 5, January 3, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 6, January 10, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 7, January 17, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 8, January 24, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 8, January 31, 1970 (issue no o. printed on paper is incorrect)

Vol. 4, No. 9, February 9, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 10, February 17, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 12, February 21, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 13, February 28, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 14, March 7, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 15, March 15, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 16, March 21, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 17, March 28, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 19, April 11, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 20, April 18, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 21, April 25, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 23, May 9, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 24, May 19, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 25, May 31, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 27, June 6, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 28, June 13, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 29, June 20, 1970

Vol. 4, No. 30, June 27, 1970

Black Panther: Volume 5, 1970-1971

Vol. 5, No. 1, July 4, 1970 (issue date printed on paper is incorrect)

Vol. 5, No. 2, July 11, 1970 (issue No. printed on paper is incorrect)

Vol. 5, No. 2, July 18, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 4, August 1, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 6, August 8, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 7, August 15, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 8, August 21, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 9, August 29, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 10, September 5, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 11, September 12, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 13, September 26, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 14, October 3, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 15, October 10, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 16, October 17, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 17, October 24, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 18, October 31, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 19, November 7, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 20, November 14, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 21, November 21, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 22, November 28, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 23, December 5, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 24, December 14, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 25, December 19, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 26, December 26, 1970

Vol. 5, No. 27, January 2, 1971

Vol. 5, No. 28, January 9, 1971

Vol. 5, No. 29, January 16, 1971

Vol. 5, No. 30, January 23, 1971

Black Panther: Volume 6, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 1, January 30, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 2, February 6, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 3, February 13, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 4, February 20, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 5, February 27, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 6, March 6, 1971

Vol. 6, 7, March 13, 1971

Vol. 6, 8, March 20, 1971

Vol. 6, 9, March 27, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 11, April 10, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 12, April 17, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 13, May 1, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 15, May 8, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 16, May 15, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 17, May 22, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 18, May 29, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 20, June 12, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 21, June 19, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 22, June 26, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 23, July , 1971

Vol. 6, No. 24, July 10, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 25, July 19, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 26, July 24, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 27, August 2, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 28, August 9, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 29, August 14, 1971

Vol. 6, No. 30, August 21, 1971

Black Panther: Volume 7, 1971-1972

Vol. 7, No. 1, August 28, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 2, September 4, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 3, September 11, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 4, September 18, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 5, September 25, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 5, October 4, 1971

(issue number printed on paper is incorrect)

Vol. 7, No. 6, October 9, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 8, October 16, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 9, October 23, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 10, October 30, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 11, November 6, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 12, November 13, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 13, November 20, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 14, November 29, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 15, December 4, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 16, December 11, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 17, December 18, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 18, December 25, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 19, January 1, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 20, January 8, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 22, January 22, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 23, January 29, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 24, February 5, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 25, February 12, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 26, February 19, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 27, February 26, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 28, March 4, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 29, March 11, 1971

Vol. 7, No. 30, March 18, 1971

Black Panther: Volume 8, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 1, March 25, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 2, April 1, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 3, April 8, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 4, April 15, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 5, April 22, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 6, April 29, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 7, May 6, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 8, May 13, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 9, May 20, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 10, May 27, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 11, June 3, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 12, June 10, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 13, June 17, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 14, June 24, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 15, July 1, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 16, July 8, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 17, July 15, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 18, July 22, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 19, July 29, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 20, August 5, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 21, August 12, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 22, August 19, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 23, August 23, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 24, September 2, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 25, September 9, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 26, September 16, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 27, September 23, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 28, September 30, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 29, October 7, 1972

Vol. 8, No. 30, October 14, 1972

Black Panther: Volume 9, 1972

Vol. 9, No. 1,October 21, 1972

Vol. 9, No. 2, October 28, 1972

Vol. 9, No. 3, November 4, 1972

Vol. 9, No. 4, November 9, 1972

Vol. 9, No. 5, November 16, 1972

Vol. 9, No. 6, November 23, 1972

Vol. 9, No. 7, November 30, 1972

Vol. 9, No. 8, December 7, 1972

Vol. 9, No. 9, December 16, 1972

Vol. 9, No. 10, December 23, 1972

Vol. 9, No. 11, December 30, 1972

Black Panther: Volume 10, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 1, May 19, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 2, May 26, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 3, June 2, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 4, June 9, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 5, June 16, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 6, June 23, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 7, June 30, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 8, July 7, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 9, July 14, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 10, July 21, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 11, July 28, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 12, August 4, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 13, August 11, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 14, August 18, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 15, August 25, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 16, September 1, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 17, September 8, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 18, September 15, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 19, September 22, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 20, September 29, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 22, October 13, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 23, October 20, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 24, October 27, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 25, November 3, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 26, November 10, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 27, November 17, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 28, November 24, 1973

Vol. 10, No. 30, December 8, 1973

Black Panther: Volume 11, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 2, January 5, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 3, January 12, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 4, January 19, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 5, January 26, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 6, February 2, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 7, February 9, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 8, February 16, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 9, February 23, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 10, March 2, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 11, March 9, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 12, March 16, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 13, March 23, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 14, March 30, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 15, April 6, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 16, April 13, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 17, April 20, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 18, April 27, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 19, May 4, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 20, May 11, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 21, May 18, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 22, May 25, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 23, June 8, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 24, June 15, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 25, June 29, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 27, July 6, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 28, July 13, 1974

Vol. 11, No. 29, July 20, 1974

Black Panther: Volume 12, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 2, August 3, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 3, August 10, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 4, August 17, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 5, August 24, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 6, August 31, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 7, September 7, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 8, September 14, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 9, September 21, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 10, September 28, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 11, October 5, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 12, October 12, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 13, October 19, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 14, October 26, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 15, November 2, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 16, November 9, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 17, November 16, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 18, November 23, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 19, November 30, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 20, December 7, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 21, December 14, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 22, December 21, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 23, December 28, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 24, January 4, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 25, January 11, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 26, January 18, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 27, January 25, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 28, February 1, 1974

Vol. 12, No. 30, February 15, 1974

Black Panther: Volume 13, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 1, February, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 2, March 1, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 3, March 8, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 4, March 15, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 5, March 22, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 6, March 29, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 7, April 5, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 8, April 12, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 9, April 10, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 10, April 28, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 11, May 5, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 12, May 12, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 13, May 19, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 14, May 26, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 15, June 2, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 16, June 9, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 17, June 16, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 18, June 23, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 19, June 30, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 20, July 7, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 21, July 14, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 22, July 21, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 23, July 28, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 24, August 4, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 25, August 11, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 26, August 18, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 27, August 25, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 28, September 1, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 29, September 8, 1975

Vol. 13, No. 30, September 15, 1975

Black Panther: Volume 14, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 1, September 22, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 2, September 29, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 3, October 6, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 4, October 14, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 5, October 18, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 6, October 25, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 7, November 1, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 9, November 15, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 10, November 22, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 12, December 6, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 13, December 13, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 14, December 20, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 15, December 27, 1975

Vol. 14, No. 16, January 3, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 17, January 10, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 18, January 17, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 19, January 24, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 20, January 31, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 21, February 7, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 22, February 14, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 23, February 21, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 24, February 28, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 25, March 6, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 26, March 13, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 27, March 20, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 28, March 27, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 29, April 3, 1976

Vol. 14, No. 30, April 10, 1976

Black Panther: Volume 15, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 1, April 17, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 2, April 24, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 3, May 1, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 4, May 8, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 5, May 15, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 6, May 22, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 7, May 29, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 8, June 5, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 9, June 12, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 10, June 19, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 11, June 26, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 12, July 3, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 13, July 10, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 14, July 17, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 15, July 24, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 17, August 7, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 18, August 14, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 19, August 21, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 20, August 28, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 21, September 4, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 22, September 11, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 23, September 18, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 24, September 25, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 25, October 2, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 26, October 9, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 27, October 16, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 28, October 23, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 29, October 29, 1976

Vol. 15, No. 30, November 6, 1976

Black Panther: Volume 16, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 8, Jan 1, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 9, Jan 8, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 10, Jan 15, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 11, Jan 22, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 12, Jan 29, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 13, Feb 5, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 14, Feb 12, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 15, Feb 19, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 16, Feb 26, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 20, Apr 2, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 21, Apr 9, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 22, Apr 16, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 23, Apr 23, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 24, Apr 30, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 25, May 7, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 26, May 14, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 27, May 21, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 28, May 28, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 29, Jun 4, 1977

Vol. 16, No. 30, Jun 11, 1977

Black Panther: Volume 17, 1977

Vol. 17, No. 1, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 2, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 3, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 4, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 5, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 6, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 7, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 8, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 9, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 10, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 11, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 12, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 13, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 14, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 15, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 16, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 17, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 18, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 19, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 20, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 21, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 22, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 23, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 24, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 25, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 26, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 27, , 1977

Vol. 17, No. 28, , 1977

Black Panther: Volume 18, 1978-1979

Vol. 18, No. 1, Jan 21, 1978

Vol. 18, No. 2, Jan 28, 1978

Vol. 18, No. 3, Feb 4, 1978

Vol. 18, No. 4, Feb 11, 1978

Vol. 18, No. 5, Feb 18, 1978

Vol. 18, No. 6, Feb 25, 1978

Vol. 18, No. 7, Mar 4, 1978

Vol. 18, No. 8, Mar 11, 1978

Vol. 18, No. 12, Apr 15, 1978

Vol. 18, No. 17, Jul 15, 1978

Vol. 18, No. 26, Dec 2-15, 1978

Vol. 18, No. 28, Dec 16-29, 1978

Vol. 18, No. 29, Dec 30, 1978

Black Panther: Volume 19, 1979-1980

Vol. 19, No. 2, Feb 19–Mar 4, 1979

Vol. 19, No. 3, Mar 12–25, 1979

Vol. 19, No. 6, Apr 30–May 13, 1979

Vol. 19, No. 7, May 14–27, 1979

Vol. 19, No. 8, May 28–Jun 10, 1979

Vol. 19, No. 9, Jul 23–Aug 5, 1979

Vol. 19, No. 10, Oct 1–14, 1979

Vol. 19, No. 11, Dec 17-31, 1979

Black Panther: Volume 20, 1980

Vol. 20, No. 1, Feb 11-24, 1980

Vol. 20, No. 2, Feb 25-Mar 9, 1980

Vol. 20, No. 3, Mar 10-22, 1980

Vol. 20, No. 4, Mar 24-Apr 6, 1980

Vol. 20, No. 5, Apr 21-May 4, 1980

Vol. 20, No. 6, May 12-25, 1980

Vol. 20, No. 7, Jul, 1980

Vol. 20, No. 8, Aug, 1980

Vol. 20, No. 9, Sep, 1980

Black Panther Party main page

Bobby Seale speech at the Oakland auditorium: February 17, 1968

AfroMarxist

Speech by Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, at the Free Huey Newton rally held at the Oakland Auditorium on February 17, 1968 on Newton's birthday. Seale goes over the Black Panther Party's list of demands for the black community, praises Newton's teachings and contributions to the Party and rallies the audience to defend themselves against the racist power structure.

http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/c…/bpp_pieces_of_history.html

IT'S ABOUT TIME: Black Panther Party Legacy & Alumni

CHAPTER HISTORY

BLACK PANTHER PARTY
Pieces of History: 1966 - 1969

1966

October 15
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale write the first draft of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) 10 - Point Program.

December
Sixteen-year-old Bobby Hutton becomes the first male recruit of the BPP.

1967

January
First BPP office opens at 5624 Grove Street, Oakland, CA.

Panthers patrol the street of Oakland.

February 21
The Panthers escort Betty Shabazz from the San Francisco airport to Ramparts for an interview with Eldridge Cleaver.

April 1
In Richmond, CA, Denzil Dowell is shot and killed by sheriff's deputies at Third and Chestly, an unincorporated area of North Richmond. Panthers respond to a request from the Dowell family for protection from police harassment.

April 25
The first issue of the Black Panther Party Black Community News Service is published. This four-page mimeograph newspaper headlines "Why Was Denzil Dowell Killed?"

May 2
Thirty armed Panthers and their supporters go to the California State Capitol at Sacramento to protest the Mulford Act, a bill aimed at banning the display of loaded weapons.

June
Riots explode in major cities, including Newark, Cleveland and Detroit.

October 28
At 4:56am, Oakland officer John Frey is killed and officer Herbert Haines wounded in a predawn altercation after stopping Huey Newton and Gene McKinney. Newton is also critically wounded.

December
The Black Panther increases its circulation tenfold.

1968

January
Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, deputy minister of defense for Southern California, organizes The Southern California branch of the BPP. The BPP office is at Central Ave. and 43rd Street.

January 16
At 3:30am, San Francisco police officers break down the apartment door of Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver. The officers ransack the apartment without a search warrant. Emory Douglas is also present.

February 8
In Orangeburg, South Carolina, on the campus of South Carolina State College, local police backed by the National Guard fire on a crowd of unarmed students; 33 black activists are shot, and three die.

February 17
A "Free Huey" rally is held at the Oakland Auditorium on Newton's birthday. More than 5,000 supporters attend including Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, James Forman, Ron Dellums, and Peace and Freedom Party representatives.

February 25
At 2:00am, Berkeley police officers break down the door and ransack the home of Bobby and Artie Seale. The Seales are charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Charges are later dropped for lack of evidence.

March
Arthur (Glen) Morris, brother of Bunchy Carter, is shot and killed by "agents" of the U.S. government. He is the first member of the BPP to be killed.

Anthony Coltrale is killed in Watts by a local police officer.

The Kansas City BPP office is raided by police and five Panthers are arrested.

March 4
An FBI memo from J. Edgar Hoover outlines goals to his staff to "Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups."

April
The New York BPP chapter is organized.

April 3
The Oakland police department raids Father Neil's church, where Party members are holding a meeting.

April 4
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, TN. Riots occur in major cities across the country, but Oakland remains calm due to the efforts of the BPP.

April 6
An Oakland police shoot-out results in the murder of Bobby Hutton; Eldridge Cleaver is wounded. Seven other Panthers are arrested.

April 7
Three Panthers are arrested in Seattle, Washington.

April 9
Panther volunteers register is assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, TN. Riots occur in major cities across the country, but Oakland remains calm due to the efforts of the BPP.

April 6
An Oakland police shoot-out results in the murder of Bobby Hutton; Eldridge Cleaver is wounded. Seven other Panthers are arrested.

April 7
Three Panthers are arrested in Seattle, Washington.

April 9
Panther volunteers register Oakland citizens to vote.

April 13
Funeral services for Bobby Hutton held at Ephesians Church of God in Christ on Alcatraz Avenue in Berkeley. More than 2,500 attend the funeral.

June
San Francisco Party captain Dexter Woods arrested for curfew violation and given 5 days in jail.

June 25
Eldridge Cleaver takes Panther case to the United Nations.

July
The West Oakland Panther office opened by Tommy Jones, Glen Stafford, and other dedicated Panther volunteers.

The Seattle BPP office is raided by local police.

Captain Aaron Dixon of the Seattle BPP and Panther Curtis Harris are arrested for grand larceny. Both are eventually found not guilty.

Captain Dexter Woods of the San Francisco BPP arrested for interference with police.

July 15-16
More than 6,000 protestors come out in support of Huey Newton on the steps of the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland. The national and international press is present as well as the National Guard.

The newly formed Brown Berets make their appearance on the courthouse steps in support of Huey.

August
The West Oakland Party office is raided and ransacked by police.

In Newark, the Panther office is firebombed.

In Detroit, Panthers and police have a shoot-out; however, there are no injuries.

Five Seattle Panthers are harassed in their car by local police.

August 5
A Los Angeles shoot-out between police and Panthers leaves two Panthers killed.

August 16
Chairman Bobby Seale and Captain David Hilliard speak to a crowd of 5,000 across the street from the Democratic National Convention.

August 17
Communications Secretary Kathleen Cleaver, in Hawaii at the Peace and Freedom Party convention, is refused the right to enter Japan.

August 25
Three Panthers -- Robert Lawrence, Steve Bartholomew, and Tommy Lewis are murdered by Los Angeles police at a service station.

September
The San Francisco Examiner prints an article exposing Panther George Murray's employment as a teacher at San Francisco State. Chancellor Dumke orders Murray's termination. The Black Student Union immediately goes on strike in support of Murray.

September 8
Newton's jury deliberates for four days and in the end come up with a compromise verdict, convicting Huey of voluntary manslaughter. He is acquitted of the assault charge and the kidnap charges are dropped.

J. Edgar Hoover declares the BPP the "greatest threat to the internal security of the country".

September 28
Huey P. Newton is sentenced to 2 to 15 years in state prison and removed from Oakland in five minutes. Judge Friedman refuses al meetings for granting a mistrial.

Four hours after Huey's conviction, two (admittedly drunk) on-duty Oakland police officers commit a drive-by shooting of the BPP office on Grove Street.

Eldridge Cleaver's parole is revoked and he is sent back to prison.

October
Denver police shoot up Panther office during racial disturbance. Panther Lauren Watson is charged with conspiracy to commit arson.

New York police department harasses Panthers over use of a bullhorn at Panther headquarters.

November 6
San Francisco State college begins major strike.

November 7
Seattle Panther Sidney Miller is murdered.

November 13
Panther Reginald Forte's car is stopped by Berkeley police. After an altercation, Forte and Officer Wolke are wounded.

November 25
FBI memo details plans to cause dissension between Los Angeles Panthers and United Slaves (US) under the leadership of Ron Karenga. December 1 Forty-three Denver police raid Panther office, cause $9,000 in damage, and steal $150 in cash.

December 7
Newark Panther office is bombed by local police.

December 12
Twelve Chicago Panthers are arrested on weapons charges.

December 18
Indianapolis Panther office is raided by FBI and local police, who fire three cans of tear gas and ransack the place; $600 in cash is taken from the Party's treasury.

December 21
Denver police raid Panther office looking for weapons, but none is found. Out of frustration officers burn food and clothing that were to be given to community poor for the holidays.

December 23
A demonstration is held by the Indiana Committee to Defend the BPP in front of the local police station. Clergy members, Citizen's Defense League, Purdue Peace League, and other community organizations are in attendance.

December 27
Des Moines Panther office is raided by 100 police officers and FBI agents. Mrs. Joanne Cheatom, president of the Des Moines Welfare Rights Organization, is arrested along with several Panthers.

December 28
San Francisco Panther office is raided by police.

Sacramento Panthers exchange gunfire in a shoot-out with police; 13 officers are wounded and 37 persons are jailed.

December 30
Los Angeles Panther Frank Diggs is shot in the head and killed by police agents.

1969

January
The Panthers' Free Breakfast for Children Program (FBCP) is under way at St. Augustine's Church in Oakland.

January 17
Los Angeles captain Bunchy Carter and Deputy Minister John Huggins are murdered in Campbell Hall on the UCLA campus, by US members.

January 24
Chicago police and FBI conspire to prevent Panther Fred Hampton from appearing on a local television talk show.

January 30
J. Edgar Hoover approves mailing of anonymous letter to provoke Blackstone Rangers to attack BPP members in Chicago.

In Des Moines, more than 100 police officers storm the BPP office.

February 13
In Berkeley, 37 student strikers are arrested in the UC Berkeley Third Third_World Strike.

March 14
In Los Angeles following a student strike meeting at Victory Baptist Church, an altercation ensues in the parking lot between US members and Panthers. Panther Ronald Freeman is wounded in the chest and groin. Local police watch the fight from their vehicle parked across the street and do not intervene.

March 17
Vallejo, CA, BPP starts FBCP with 35 children. Within a week the number of children grows to 110.

March 19
Panthers Bobby Seale and Masai Hewitt tour Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

March 24
In Los Angeles, inflammatory letters instigated by the FBI are sent to Panthers from US members.

March 26
In Des Moines, Iowa, a house used as the BPP office is completely demolished by CDT plastic explosives. Later, in testimony before the House Committee on Un- American Activities, Panthers and the local police department accuse each other of the bombing.

March 28
In San Francisco, police officers tear gas, fire upon using automatic weapons, and raid Party office. A total of 16 Panthers are arrested.

April 1
In Chicago, the FBCP began with 83 children, and by the end of the week more than 1,100 children are fed.

In New York, 21 Panthers are arrested on a wide variety of conspiracy charges.

April 10
In New York, high school students hold a demonstration at Long Island City High School to demand freedom for the Panther 21 arrested on conspiracy charges.

April 13
In Des Moines, Iowa, the Panthers' FBCP is attacked by police.

April 26
In Des Moines, Iowa, the BPP office is totally destroyed by a firebomb.

May 4
"Free Huey" rallies are held in 20 major cities at U.S. federal district courts.

May 13
New Jersey Panthers David Williams and Marion Fields are harassed by officers for passing out leaflets.

May 20
In Greensboro, North Carolina, the National Guard, with tanks and helicopters, shoots up the campus with tear gas during student unrest.

May 21
In New Haven, Connecticut, Panther Alex Rackley is viciously tortured and murdered by undercover agent George Sams who eventually pled guilty to second-degree murder and whose status as an agent was confirmed at his trial. Before his arrest many Panther offices were raided under the pretext of looking for him.

May 22
New Haven, Connecticut, Panther office is raided by police, and Panthers are arrested on conspiracy to commit murder.

May 23
San Diego Panther John Savage is murdered by US members.

May 31
In Berkeley, the FBI curtails distribution of Party newspapers by ripping them up and disrupting U.S. mail service. United Airlines and TWA accept contracts to receive and deliver the newspaper, but now deny receiving the newspaper.

June 4
In Detroit, local police storm the BPP office in search of suspects in the New Haven murder of Alex Rackley; $25,000 damage is done to the office and bail is set at $4,000 each. Charges on all Panthers arrested are dropped.

The Liberation School, a BPP survival program, starts.

June 5
Indianapolis, Indiana, Panther Fred Crawford is arrested for assault and battery.

Los Angeles, Panther Daniel Lynem is charged with murder. Charges are eventually dropped.

In Denver, Colorado, Rory Hithe and Landon Williams are arrested with no bail and charged with conspiracy in connection with the New York 21 and Connecticut 8 as well as unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

June 7
the Chicago BPP office is raided in search of George Sams. Eight Panthers are arrested and charged with harboring a fugitive. Bail is set at $1,000, but all charges are dropped.

Seventeen Panthers in Indianapolis, Indiana, are arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

June 8
Los Angeles Panther Wayne Pharr is charged with murder. Charges are later dropped.

June 10
In Chicago, 16 Panthers, including William O'Neal (an undercover agent), are indicted for conspiracy, kidnapping, and aggravated battery. Bail is set at $100,000 each.

June 13
Panthers Joel Brown and Ron Davis are attacked, maced, and arrested by police for allegedly blocking a public walkway while selling BPP newspapers.

June 15
the San Diego and Sacramento BPP offices are raided.

June 19
In Chicago, Panther David Smith is arrested for selling the BPP newspaper.

June 23
In Los Angeles, Geronimo Pratt and Roger Lewis are arrested on suspicion of murder. The charges are later dropped.

June 26
In Jersey City, 4 Panthers are arrested for carrying concealed weapons. Bail is set at $350 each.

June 28
Eleven New York Panthers are arrested and charged with obstructed vision because there were too many people in one car. Seven are released on $1,000 bail, the remaining 4 are held for selling BPP newspapers.

June 30
In Los Angeles, Ron Freeman is arrested on suspicion of murder and possession of drugs. Charges are later dropped.

Jersey City local police departments report on the BPP before a Senate Subcommittee in Washington DC.

July
In Jersey City, Panther Floyd Tyler is arrested and charged with murder, but soon released.

July 2
In San Francisco, Panther Liberation School opens.

July 3
In Chicago, Bobby Rush is stopped in a car and arrested for driving without a license plate and sticker despite the fact that the receipt is taped to the car window.

July 13
San Diego police provoke a 2-day riot, leaving 2 dead, several wounded, and 100 arrested. Two officers are killed as well.

July 17
New Haven, Connecticut, Panthers initiate lead poisoning testing. This state has the worst lead poisoning in the country.

July 18
In Oakland, the United Front Against Fascism conference runs 3 days. The goal is to plan and discuss community control of police.

July 20
In Queens, New York, Liberation School opens with 90 children.

July 24
In San Francisco, another Liberation School is started at Hunters Point.

July 26
In San Diego, the John Savage Memorial FBCP moves ahead despite vandals who broke into the church and destroyed food.

In Algeria, Eldridge Cleaver is cheered as he addresses the people in front of the new Afro-American Information Center. Cleaver is joined by Emory Douglas, David Hilliard, Masai Hewitt, Baby Dee, and the daughter of Richard Wright to attend a 12-day Pan-African Cultural Festival.

July 31
In Chicago, the BPP office is raided in an unprovoked attack that lasts 45 minutes. Police destroy food and take $500 in cash. Panther Pete Hayman is charged with attempted murder and is severely beaten and hospitalized.

August 1
In Milwaukee, Panther Richard Smith is arrested for jaywalking and selling BPP newspapers.

New York Panthers Robert Moore and Eula May Fischer are both arrested for selling BPP newspapers without a permit.

August 2
In Richmond, CA, police raid the BPP office.

In Kansas City, the BPP opens the Bobby Hutton Free Health Clinic.

August 4
In Denver, the BPP starts a FBCP.

August 15
San Diego Panther Sylvester Bell is shot and killed by US members. The FBCP is closed due to shootings.

August 16
In Ann Arbor, Michigan, White Panther Party Minister of Information John Sinclair is convicted for selling 2 joints to an undercover agent.

August 19
Bobby Seale is kidnapped by Berkeley police after leaving the wedding of Masai Hewitt and Shirley Neely. He is immediately taken to San Francisco and charged with initiating the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and New Haven murder of Alex Rackley.

August 22
Harlem Panthers initiate a FBCP and Free Clothing Program at All Saints Catholic Church.

August 30
The Black Panther brings attention to South African political prisoner Nelson Mandela.

September 2
San Diego police fire bullets and gas rockets into Panther home for 45 minutes. People in the community throw bottles and rocks at police. Officers in turn kick down citizens' doors and beat the people.

September 4
In Chicago, a federal judge orders Bobby Seale gagged and shackled to a metal folding chair and eventually removes him from the courtroom.

The BPP in Chicago opens a free medical health clinic.

September 6
The Berkeley Tribe newspaper reveals a transcript of a 35-step assault plan by Berkeley police to engage in a full-scale attack on the BPP National Headquarters.

September 12
In Los Angeles, Panther Nathaniel Clark is murdered.

September 24
In Philadelphia, the BPP office is raided. The FBI takes file records and petitions for community control of the police.

October
In New York, the Young Lords are organized by Cha Cha Jiminez.

In Philadelphia, Barbara Cox initiates Panther Free Clothing Program.

October 18
Panther Walter "Toure" Pope is murdered by Los Angeles metro squad in broad daylight as he drops BPP newspapers off at store.

November
In Seattle, the BPP opens a free medical clinic.

November 22
In New Haven, Connecticut, 5,000 demonstrators march and converge at state courthouse in support of BPP members charged with murder of Alex Rackley.

November 25
In Chicago, 13 Panthers are held in "preventive detention" on $100,000 bail for trumped-up conspiracy charges to blow up various locations.

December 4
In Chicago, Fred Hampton, and Mark Clark are viciously murdered by police while they sleep.

December 8
Los Angeles police department launches a full- scale attack on Southern California Panthers in a predawn raid. At two separate locations, 400 officers arrest Party members and children.

During one shoot-out, Roland Freeman's body is riddled with bullets, but he survives.

December 10
Los Angeles Local Union 535, Social Services Workers' Union, passes a resolution to protest the political murders of Panthers across the country and to demand the release of all political prisoners.

December 26
The entire shipment of BPP newspapers shipped to New Haven, Connecticut, never arrives.

December 27
In Los Angeles, the Bunchy Carter Free Health Clinic opens.

December 30
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, shipment of BPP newspapers arrives a week late.

Page | 1 | | 2 |

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4RZEmaNUW4

All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50 (2016)

Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)

All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50 With Introduction by Fredrika Newton

This video features Black Panther Party members and young activists, artists, poets, and community advocates answering questions and reflecting on the Black Panther Party legacy and how it resonates today. Created for the OMCA exhibition, All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50 which was on view in 2017.

Video produced by Bread and Butter Films, 2016. Intro video produced by Theo Schear.

Featuring:

Bobby Seale, Co-Founder, Black Panther Party Ericka Huggins, Black Panther Party, 1967–1981 Billy X Jennings, Black Panther Party, 1968–1972 David Levinson, Physician M. Gayle Dickson aka Asali, Black Panther Party, 1970–1976 Saturu Ned aka James Mott, Black Panther Party, 1968–1981

Chinaka Hodge, Poet Shayna, Melita, Jessica, Give Us the Floor teen program Kamani Holmes, DetermiNation Black Men’s Group Cat Brooks, Actress and Activist Meres-sia Gabriel, Poet and Musician Mwende Hahesy, Media Producer Malik Hardcastle, DetermiNation Black Men’s Group Marc Philpart, Community Advocate Prince White, Community Organizer Joan Tarika Lewis,

Black Panther Party, 1967–1969

BOBBY SEALE AND HUEY P. NEWTON IN 1970

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Beware of Fascist America's Very Own Resident Psycho and the Trump Regime's Most Powerful, Malevolent, and RUTHLESS Advisor and Pathologically Criminal Henchman and Corrupt Architect Stephen Miller.

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:38:02 +0000

https://zeteo.com/p/stephen-miller-trump-running-world

Zeteo U.S. Politics

American ‘Psycho,’ Fascist Dork: Inside Stephen Miller’s War of Terror

The world’s most powerful unelected bureaucrat is leading Trump’s wars on immigrants, civilians, the law, and human decency. It doesn’t matter that he’s made Trump historically unpopular.

by Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez

16 hours ago

Note from our Editor-in-Chief:

This week, we are launching our series on the ‘Four Horsemen of the Trump-ocalypse.’ With several weeks left in the 2026 midterm elections, we believe this is the moment to capture the damage the Trump administration has inflicted throughout the U.S. and the world – and profile some of the people most responsible. The only way we can report original, long-form stories like these is with your support. This is why we all need to support independent media, in this new age of American authoritarianism. – Mehdi

Stephen Miller in the Oval Office on Sept. 15, 2025. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.

The United States is now run by someone whose critics and victims routinely dub an American “psycho,” a man who revels in the pain and suffering of his enemies and his prey. Indeed, many of his allies, and his past and present colleagues, would describe him using precisely the same word.

We are, of course, talking about Stephen Miller, not his boss, Donald Trump.

Miller, who serves as Trump’s top policy architect and one of the president’s most committed loyalists, doesn’t care about human life the way you or I do, former and current Trump administration officials who’ve worked with him tell Zeteo. Several of these sources actually quite like Miller. Still, the degree to which Miller does not care about – or at least tolerates – the loss of human lives in the pursuit of his and President Trump’s policy vision has unnerved, or disturbed, some of his Republican colleagues, multiple Trump advisers and U.S. government officials recount.

Some of his associates in and close to the administration even accuse him of intentionally trying to push major U.S. cities to riot, to create a pretext for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, an early 19th-century law, so that he could send thousands of active-duty and National Guard troops to fully occupy those urban areas. One source directly familiar with Miller’s private deliberations tells Zeteo: “Stephen wanted to provoke a very strong response, so that the president would deploy troops.”

It has been just under two years since Trump won the presidency for the second time, and the scale of democratic backsliding, rampant corruption, and sheer violence unleashed on this continent and others is remarkably difficult to tabulate. The administration has normalized putting troops in the streets; deploying masked, violent immigration agents to kidnap and intimidate and kill people; punishing immigrants, including many with a legal right to be here, by shipping them to dangerous countries, including places where they have no ties, simply to be cruel; murdering supposed drug smugglers with regularity in international waters; tearing apart the core constitutional right to due process at every opportunity, so that people can’t challenge the government’s claims against them before they are removed or killed; politicizing every lever of the government so that it targets their enemies, and only their enemies, as part of a swarming attack on Democrats and the left and liberal nonprofit and political infrastructure; actively ignoring the First Amendment; spewing the most blatant kinds of racism from the White House, including at Somali Americans and Haitians; plotting in broad daylight to rig elections and subvert the American democratic order; and so, so much more.

On Trump’s behalf, Miller has overseen, or orchestrated, all of it. He has led Trump’s deportation operations and the president’s efforts to target and selectively prosecute his enemies at an intensely granular level. That includes overseeing what a Trump adviser described to Zeteo as the administration’s “Must Deport list.” When Miller has discussed behind closed doors the administration’s deportations to third-countries (where the immigrants have no ties), he has explicitly said that it is better to strike those agreements with nations with lousy human rights records – in part because those regimes often do what they’re told by the United States, sources who’ve been in the room with him say.

It is impossible to come to any other conclusion: At almost every single meaningful turn of the second Trump era, the president’s lead policy author has sought to make the government’s crackdowns more painful, and less humane, for its countless dragnet victims and their families.

Let that be his, and his boss’s, legacy – and perhaps their undoing.

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:17:32 +0000

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF MICHEL FOUCAULT (b. October 15, 1926—d. June 25, 1984)

Today, October 15, 2026 we feature the foundational ideas, theories, and legacy of the iconic and legendary public intellectual, scholar, historian, philosopher, critical theorist, social and literary critic, and activist Michel Foucault—Part 1

https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-ideas-of-foucault-99758

Michel Foucault argued that surveillance, such as CCTV, is used to enforce social norms. From www.shutterstock.com

Explainer: the ideas of Foucault
August 26, 2019
The Conversation

Michel Foucault was one of the most famous thinkers of the late 20th century, achieving celebrity-like status before his untimely death in 1984.

His academic career culminated in a 1970 appointment as “professor of history of systems of thought” at France’s most prestigious university – the College de France. This unusual title was created because of the distinctive nature of Foucault’s work, which straddled disciplines such as philosophy, history, and politics.

Michel Foucault. Goodreads

Foucault was interested in power and social change. In particular, he studied how these played out as France shifted from a monarchy to democracy via the French revolution.

He believed that we have tended to oversimplify this transition by viewing it as an ongoing and inevitable attainment of “freedom” and “reason”. This, he said, had caused us to misunderstand the way that power operates in modern societies.

For instance, even though the new form of government no longer relied on torture, and public hangings as punishments, it still sought to control people’s bodies — by focusing on their minds.

In his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, Foucault argued that French society had reconfigured punishment through the new “humane” practices of “discipline” and “surveillance”, used in new institutions such as prisons, the mental asylums, schools, workhouses and factories.

These institutions produced obedient citizens who comply with social norms, not simply under threat of corporal punishment, but as a result of their behaviour being constantly sculpted to ensure they fully internalise the dominant beliefs and values.

In Foucault’s view, new “disciplinary” sciences (for instance, criminology, psychiatry, education) aimed to make all “deviance” visible, and thus correctable, in a way that was impossible in the previous social order.

He used English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s 1787 Panopticon as a metaphor to illustrate his point. This was a circular prison designed to lay each inmate open to the scrutiny of a central watchtower, which was positioned so that individual prisoners could never know when they are being watched.

Jeremy Bentham’s plan of the Panopticon. Jeremy Bentham/Wikimedia Commons

The prisoners therefore always had to act as though they were being watched. In the wider world, he argued, this resulted in docile people who could fit into the discipline of factories, mental institutions, and the dominant sexual morality.

Foucault argued that people with “mental illnesses” (formerly known as madness) were controlled by relentless efforts at correction to a scientifically determined “norm”.

His 1976 History of Sexuality Volume 1 argued that, rather than talking about deviant acts, scientists talked about deviant types, such as “the pervert” or “the homosexual”, who were in need of concerted efforts of medical intervention and correction.
Power/knowledge

Foucault argued that knowledge and power are intimately bound up. So much so, that that he coined the term “power/knowledge” to point out that one is not separate from the other.

History of Sexuality, Volume One. Goodreads

Every exercise of power depends on a scaffold of knowledge that supports it. And claims to knowledge advance the interests and power of certain groups while marginalising others. In practice, this often legitimises the mistreatment of these others in the name of correcting and helping them.

What has made Foucault so appealing to such a broad range of scholars is that he didn’t just look at abstract theories of philosophy or of historical change. Rather, he analysed what was actually said. In his most important works, this included an analysis of texts, images and buildings in order to map how forms of knowledge change.

For example, he argued that sexuality was not simply repressed in the 19th century. Rather, it was widely discussed in an expanding new scientific literature where patients were encouraged to talk about sexual experiences in clinical settings.

With the recent explosion in surveillance cameras as well the role of “big data” we have now well and truly entered the surveillance society. Foucault’s insights on this topic continue to be explored by scholars across the social sciences and humanities.

He has also had a substantial influence on contemporary work in sexuality and gender, sociological studies of mental health institutions and of the medical profession; and in history, politics, cultural studies, and beyond.

An important feature of his theory is that where there is power there is also always resistance. So there are always “sites of resistance”: spaces that hold out the promise for a reconfiguring of power relations in a way that might redress oppressive institutions and practices.

For example, homosexuality has historically been reinterpreted as a “sin”, a “medical pathology”, and now a legitimate “sexuality”, showing how change is possible.

But it is only through a deepened understanding of the origin and structure of our present social order that we will be able to grasp and seize future possibilities for social change.

Philosophy
Sexuality
Power
Jeremy Bentham
Social theory
Michel Foucault
French universities
history of sexuality

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Christopher Pollard

Professor Pollard is Tutor in Philosophy and Sociology, Deakin University

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:40:14 +0000

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF OSCAR BROWN, JR. (b. October 10, 1926--d. May 29, 2005)

Today, October 6, 2026 we feature the life, art, and legacy of the iconic and legendary musician, composer, songwriter, poet, playwright, singer, teacher, producer, and activist Oscar Brown, Jr. (b. October 10, 1926--d. May 29, 2005)--Part 1

https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2016/07/oscar-brown-jr-1926-2005-legendary_22.html

Saturday, July 2, 2016

Oscar Brown, Jr. (1926-2005): Legendary, iconic, and innovative composer, singer, songwriter, lyricist, playwright, actor, poet, ensemble leader, teacher, and political and cultural activist

SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU

SUMMER, 2016

VOLUME THREE NUMBER ONE

PHOTO: OSCAR BROWN, JR,

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/oscar-brown-jr-mn0000894827/biography

Oscar Brown, Jr.
(1926-2005)
Artist Biography by Jason Ankeny

OSCAR BROWN, JR.
(b. October 10, 1926--d. May 29, 2005)

Although rooted in jazz, singer, poet, and activist Oscar Brown, Jr. defied musical categorization throughout his long and eclectic career -- a forerunner of the political consciousness that would become predominant in soul, funk, and hip-hop in the decades to follow, his efforts to exact social change spread across the arts and even into government, spurring two unsuccessful but memorable campaigns for office. Born on Chicago's South Side on October 10, 1926, Brown was the son of a successful attorney and property broker who wanted his firstborn someday to assume control of the family business; instead, Brown was drawn to writing and performing, and by 15 was a regular on writer Studs Terkel's radio program Secret City. After skipping two grades, he entered the University of Wisconsin at 16, but finding the world of academia little to his liking,Brown returned to broadcasting, and in 1944 was tapped to host Negro Newsfront, the nation's first black news radio broadcast. Dubbed "America's first Negro newscaster," he relinquished the gig in 1948 to run for the Illinois state legislature on the Progressive Party ticket -- he did not win, and spent the remainder of the decade working on writer/producer Richard Durham's Black Radio Days series, followed by a two-year stint in the U.S. Army.

Though a card-carrying Communist, in 1952 Brown mounted an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Congress on the Republican ticket, aligning himself with the right wing solely to get his name on the ballot. (He resigned from the Communist Party in 1956, declaring himself "just too black to be red.") Through all this time, singing and songwriting remained little more than sidelines, but that all changed in 1958, when Brown attended the opening of Lorraine Hansberry's landmark play A Raisin in the Sun -- there he metHansberry's husband, the New York City music publisher Robert Nemiroff, and their fledgling friendship soon yielded a record deal with Columbia. In 1960, Browncollaborated with Max Roach on the legendary bop drummer's trenchant civil rights project We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, soon followed by his solo debut, Sin & Soul -- launched via an extended residency at the famed Village Vanguard, the record featured readings of popular jazz instrumentals like Nat Adderley's "Work Song" and Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue" with new, socially charged lyrics penned by Brown himself. "Brown Baby," a lullaby written for his newborn son, went on to emerge as something of a modern standard, with covers by vocalists including Mahalia Jackson and Lena Horne.

The creative and commercial success of Sin & Soul made Brown a star, and after writing lyrics for Miles Davis' classic "All Blues," he reunited with Hansberry and Nemiroff for 'Kicks & Co.', a stage musical that earned Brown an unheard-of two-hour appearance on NBC television's Today Show. The show nevertheless closed shortly after its preview series at Chicago's McCormick Place in 1961, and after reworking some of the material to create a one-man show, Oscar Brown Entertains, he toured the U.S. and Europe, in 1962 stopping long enough to host the television series Jazz Scene USA, during taping meeting his future wife, singer/dancer Jean Pace. Through his concert appearances and LPs, including 1963's Tells It Like It Is! and 1965's Mr. Oscar Brown, Jr. Goes to Washington, he kept his social and political beliefs front and center, refusing to accept the common wisdom that mainstream audiences wanted no part of such stuff -- withPace, he wrote and directed a series of stage shows casting teens from Chicago's impoverished neighborhoods, and the most famous of the couple's collaborations, 1967's Opportunity Please Knock, was even produced in conjunction with the Blackstone Rangers youth gang. The Browns' work with underprivileged youth also earned a 1968 invitation from Gary, IN, mayor Richard Hatcher to helm a summer talent project that was a springboard for then-unknowns the Jackson 5 and actor/singer Avery Brooks.

After relocating to San Francisco in 1969, Brown and Pace transformed the stage comedy Big Time Buck White into a musical that, upon making the leap to Broadway, starred boxing legend Muhammad Ali in the title role. Brown spent much of the 1970s as an artist-in-residence teaching musical theater at Washington, D.C.'s Howard University, New York City's Hunter College, and Chicago's Malcolm X College. In 1972, after a seven-year hiatus from the recording studio, he delivered Where Are You, followed by a pair of releases for Atlantic: 1973's Brother Where Are You and 1975's Fresh. Also in 1975, he starred in the revived Evolution of the Blues and starred in a Chicago television special, Oscar Brown Is Back in Town, which earned a pair of local Emmy Awards. Brown was next tapped to host the acclaimed 1980 PBS series From Jump Street: The Story of Black Music, and went on to appear in network series including Brewster Place and Roc. His first album in two decades, Then and Now, appeared on Weasel Disc in 1995, and in 2001 he was the subject of a documentary, Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress. Brown died from complications from a blood infection on May 29, 2005.

Oscar Brown, Jr.—" I Apologize”
Def Poetry Jam—HBO
Season 2; Episode 4
2003

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3szc53yb7J0

http://soundprojections.blogspot.com/…/nancy-wilson-b-febru…

Jazz Scene USA with Nancy Wilson 1962 - Host: Oscar Brown, Jr.

Lou Levy - piano, Al McKibbon - bass, Kenny Dennis - drums.

Setlist:

1- Happy Talk 2- Little Girl Blue 3- Put On a Happy Face 4- Never Will I Marry 5- Guess Who I Saw Today 6- I Believe In You -

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npFMr0IGYJA

Title:

JAZZ SCENE USA series Episode: NANCY WILSON

Contributor Names
Steve Binder (director)

Created / Published
USA.

Notes
- Information from: "Jazz on the Screen" by David Meeker. Used with permission. (Source)

- Made-for-TV series.
- Short film (under 30 minutes).

- "Give Irving my love" (theme); "Happy talk" by Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers; "Little girl blue" by Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart; "Put on a happy face" by Lee Adams, Charles Strouse; "Never will I marry", "I believe in you" by Frank Loesser; "Guess who I saw today?" by Elisse Boyd, Murray Grand. (Songs)

- Nancy Wilson, vocal, accompanied by Lou Levy, piano; Al McKibbon, acoustic double bass; Kenny Dennis, drums.

(Personnel on Camera)

- Recorded on 4th September 1962 and hosted by Oscar Brown, Jr.

IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 04:37:48 +0000

This is Fascism: A Wake-Up Call To Resist
by Rosan Smits
The Experiment 2026

[Publication date: September 15, 2026]

An international bestseller, this “excellent” (Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny), urgent book outlines how fascism has returned to the mainstream―and how we can stop it

Fascism is back. This time no swastikas or concentration camps, but MAGA hats and masked immigration officers. In his second term, Donald Trump is putting together a fascist regime. Not only Trump’s political adversaries say so; his own former advisers do, too. Internationally renowned scholars―experts in the field of fascism―say the evidence is overwhelming: Fascism is on the rise, not just in the US but around the world.

Political scientist Rosan Smits topples the strongly held conviction in the West that our established democracies are immune. They are not. Fascism wasn’t just born in the West; it’s where new variants are being incubated. And these modern variants pose a threat not only to our national democracies but the international rules-based order built on law and human rights. The illusion that “it can’t happen here” makes us vulnerable and apathetic, precisely at a moment when action is still possible.

Standing up against emerging fascism requires collective action. Nothing is inevitable in politics, and fascism doesn’t stand a chance if enough people understand that an attack on one person’s freedom is an attack on everyone’s freedom.

If, in short, enough people understand: This is fascism.

REVIEWS:

"An unignorable warning against political apathy."

― Publishers Weekly

"This book is a distress signal. Rosan Smits makes it crystal clear how fascism is being normalized at alarming speed. Think it can't happen in Western democracies? Then read this book―because it already is."
― Rutger Bregman, author of Moral Ambition and Humankind

"A masterful and chilling dissection of the modern ideology of hate."
― Paul Mason, author of How to Stop Fascism

"After a decade of debate about the nature of the global far right, Rosan Smits amasses the evidence and the competing analyses to produce a definitive judgment: This Is Fascism. A necessary read to understand the challenge we face now from the xenophobic ideology destroying democracies across the west. We cannot act unless we know what we face and with this work Rosan Smits has settled that question."
― Jason Stanley, author of the New York Times–bestselling How Fascism Works

"An excellent read."
― Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

"Few journalists address the major issues of our time. Rosan Smits does. She explains clearly and convincingly what fascism is and why we need to use the word now. A necessary book."
― Simon Kuper, Financial Times journalist

"This book is a mirror. And we would be foolish not to look."
― Carice van Houten, award-winning Game of Thrones actress

"Brilliant."
― Alastair Campbell, host of The Rest Is Politics

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rosan Smits is a political scientist and has conducted research on radicalization and violence in war zones for many years. She led the Conflict Research Unit at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations. Since 2017, she has been deputy editor in chief of De Correspondent.

Huey P. Newton: I Am We
by Delio Vasquez
Polity, 2026

[Publication date: ‎ September 28, 2026]

Huey P. Newton was called many things in his time: revolutionary, genius, criminal, even the most surveilled human being in world history. Yet, little of the truth about him is known today due to persistent distortions of his legacy as co-founder of the Black Panther Party.

In this much-needed intellectual history, Delio Vásquez establishes Newton as a true philosopher. Newton developed innovative theories for how the most oppressed could spearhead revolutionary change in a rapidly developing technological society. Inspired by his ideas, the Panthers forged alliances with Black student unions and street gangs, Hollywood elites and poor whites, the gay liberation movement and Third World nations.

Newton left behind dozens of unpublished manuscripts analyzing politics, feminist thought, education, philosophy, evolutionary biology, and theology – texts presented here for the first time. Vásquez also puts into proper perspective Newton's late descent into addiction and madness – a direct effect of US government techniques of cognitive war that targeted his body and mind in ways that remain all too relevant today.

REVIEWS:

"This brilliant book is the long-awaited definitive treatment of the intellectual genius of Huey P. Newton! It shatters the narrow image of this great Black revolutionary figure and discloses a genuine truth-seeker and defender of oppressed people around the world."

–Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary

"This book educates us about love, the lumpen, and the liabilities of freedom fighters. Huey P. Newton shouldered his love for the people. Despite the fractures of betrayals and addictions, he studied and advocated for liberation, and left a legacy for study and to seek principled paths for liberation."

–Joy James, Williams College

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Delio Vásquez is Assistant Professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

I Hear Freedom: The Great Migration, Free Jazz, and Black Power
by Cisco Bradley
Columbia University Press, 2026

[Publication date: March 17, 2026]

In the 1960s, a musical revolution took place in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland and Detroit. Disenchanted with the strictures of bebop, musicians forged a new style―free jazz―that took inspiration from a vast range of sources, including figures such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane; African and Middle Eastern music; avant-garde modernism; and the politics and aesthetics of Black Power. How did this radical movement come about, and what explains its creativity and vitality?

Based on interviews with dozens of musicians, I Hear Freedom tells the story of free jazz and its connection to the broader Black experience. Cisco Bradley demonstrates that although this part of the free jazz movement arose in the Midwest, it is deeply rooted in the musical traditions and aesthetics that the Great Migration brought from the South. As postwar urban renewal projects fractured Black communities, musicians drew on this heritage to create new forms of expression. Figures such as Albert Ayler, Donald Ayler, Charles Tyler, Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Charles Moore, and Faruq Z. Bey developed distinct artistic visions, often influenced by their involvement in Black liberation movements. I Hear Freedom chronicles the Cleveland and Detroit free jazz scenes, and it follows musicians to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and beyond. A revelatory oral history, this book shows that free jazz is a uniquely Black style shaped by mobility, community, and the struggle for freedom.

REVIEWS:

"Through meticulous oral histories, archival research, and theoretical insight, Bradley expands the scope and tenor of jazz historiography by revealing how Black familial lineages carried musical values of mobility, collectivity, and experimentation into the heart of northern urban modernity and made jazz a blueprint for the Black radical tradition and its dreams of liberation." -- Benjamin Barson, author of Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons

"In I Hear Freedom, Cisco Bradley guides readers through an alternative, ethnographic model of jazz―and thus American music―history. Other jazz scholars posit linear genealogies, with musicians/composers evolving out of past styles and artists; Bradley instead situates Black improvising musicians/composers within their familial, community, and professional networks. With extensive and unprecedented archival research, Bradley reveals how migratory movement drove free jazz’s experimentalist praxis and how encounters made along the journey culminated in art." -- Kwami Coleman, author of Change: The New Thing and Modern Jazz

"[A] comprehensive, vivid treatment of social as well as musical factors in the development of free jazz." ― The Wire

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Cisco Bradley is professor of history at the Pratt Institute. His books include The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (2023) and Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (2021). He is also the director of the documentary Take Me to Fendika (2024).

A Burning House: My Politics
by Harry Belafonte
(Based on conversations with Kevin Baker)
The New Press, 2026

[Publication date: October 13, 2026]

The late, legendary performer and activist’s candid reflections on American race relations and social movements, based on previously unpublished conversations with the award-winning historian

“The only thing that has disrupted—and at the same time anointed—my path to popular successes was my politics, because I’ve said and done things that most artists would never have survived.” —Harry Belafonte

Harry Belafonte was more than a bestselling folk singer and Hollywood’s first Black matinée idol; he was also the secret weapon of human rights movements for seventy years—a close confidante of Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt; a trusted whisperer to JFK; and a political advisor to African heads of state.

Belafonte simultaneously advised Robert F. Kennedy on how to win the Black vote, openly supported Communist leaders including Fidel Castro, and skillfully avoided being blacklisted by J. Edgar Hoover. He was also a masterful fundraiser, almost singlehandedly bankrolling the civil rights movement from his own earnings as well as donations solicited from Hollywood friends and Vegas mobsters. It was Belafonte’s idea to organize superstar artists to record the hit song “We Are the World” in 1984 to benefit famine victims in Africa.

In this candid, revelatory book, drawn from a series of conversations with historian Kevin Baker shortly before Belafonte’s death in 2023, the legendary singer of “Day-O” shares his philosophy on racial politics, African colonialism, the emergence of Israel, the shortcomings of Barack Obama, and the rise of Donald Trump. A Burning House offers a primer on celebrity activism at its best—as well as a cautionary tale about the rise of American authoritarianism.
Review

Praise for A Burning House:
“Candid reflections from the epitome of the artist-activist.”—John Legend

"Insisting that ‘the world’s on fire. Something yet has to be done,’ Belafonte urges all Americans to rediscover their radicalism. It’s an invaluable rallying cry."—Publishers Weekly

“One of the most gifted conversationalists of our times, Belafonte’s literary panache and vibrant rhetoric are evident on every page.”—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Entertaining Race

“A bracing reminder that Belafonte was never only an entertainer—he was always a deeply committed activist working all his life to repair the world. His searing critiques of greed and the passive acceptance of the status quo are unforgettable.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

“Anytime we talked, Belafonte spoke a truth that pierced your soul. He has left us with a beautiful gift in A Burning House.”—Roland S. Martin, host of #RolandMartinUnfiltered

“Harry Belafonte created the blueprint for being an artist and an activist long before a path was defined. . . . His legacy reminds us to stand in the light and fight.”—Erica Alexander, actress, writer-producer, activist, co-founder, Color Farm Media

“These final reflections reveal the conviction, courage, and political clarity that made Harry Belafonte one of the most consequential movement figures of our time.”—Rashad Robinson, social justice leader and author of From Presence to Power

“Belafonte bravely used his gifts from God to uplift our culture, the entertainment industry, art, and the world.”—Omari Hardwick, actor

“Harry Belafonte was one of the great organic intellectual and great talkers of our age. There’s no better way to understand all that he still has to teach us than to read his own words.”—Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, author of Daylight Come: Harry Belafonte and the World He Made

“Drawn from a series of conversations with journalist Baker, Belafonte’s reflections on political activism begin with his heroes. Recounting his time with Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Jackie Robinson, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., Belafonte constructs a genealogy for his own style of celebrity activism. . . . Many readers are likely to benefit from Belafonte’s experiences and insights.”—Kirkus Reviews

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Harry Belafonte (1927–2023) was a chart-topping American singer, actor, and civil rights activist best known for popularizing calypso music internationally.

Kevin Baker is an American political commentator and journalist, author of the bestselling Paradise Alley (2002), winner of the 2003 American Book Award and James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction. He lives in New York City.

Long Live the Black Radical Tradition: IN TRIBUTE TO AND CELEBRATION OF THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE, ART, AND LEGACY OF LEROI JONES/AMIRI BARAKA. Happy 92nd birthday Amiri!--Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:14:02 +0000

OCTOBER 7, 2026 MARKED THE 92nd BIRTHDAY OF ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT, INFLUENTIAL, AND INNOVATIVE WRITERS AND RADICAL POLITICAL THINKERS, CRITICS, AND ACTIVISTS OF THE PAST CENTURY. HIS NAME IS AMIRI BARAKA aka LEROI JONES (1934-2014).

“There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you.”

--Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1934-2014)

PHOTO: Leroi Jones in his apartment in Harlem, NYC 1966

Jitterbugs
by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
(1934-2014)

The imperfection of the world
is a burden, if you know it, think
about it, at all. Look up in the sky
wishing you were free, placed so terribly
in time, mind out among new stars, working
propositions, and not this planet where you
cant go anywhere without an awareness of the hurt the white man has put on the people. Any people. You cant escape, there's no where to go. They have made this star unsafe, and this age, primitive, though yr mind is somewhere else, your ass aint.

(Published in Negro Digest, April 1966)

RED LIGHT

by Leroi Jones aka Amiri Baraka, 1966

The only thing we know is the thing we turn out to be. I don't care what you think, it's true, now you think your way out of this

..."LeRoi wanted to be a writer in a time before the hyper-professionalisation of the craft. Black writers coming of age in the 1950s weren’t told they had to get MFAs. Baldwin hadn’t gone to college, Langston Hughes had dropped out. LeRoi had been at Howard with Toni Morrison, and though she’d finished, she hadn’t yet published her first book by the time he, a ‘drop-out,’ had. The most heralded writers were living adventurous and very raw social lives, not yet mediated by the demands of universities, and their art imitated their very singular modes of existence. The United States had yet to convince the entire population it was middle class and had a vested interest in the continuation of the status quo, so that these same writers were belligerently opposed to how their nation was being run, how their families and friends were being forced to live, in Harlem, in Paris, in Bohemia, everywhere capitalism was sold. Without the flimsy safety-net of bureaucratic writing and literature degrees, writers were not as busy pandering to that machine and could be honest about its dirty grooves. So instead of being in a classroom in a system scripted by Western ideology and pedagogy, instead of being indoctrinated in the merits of unconditional ‘objectivity,’ LeRoi was writing his own script, fumbling, but on his own terms. And so there was no sense of propriety or trepidation when the call came inviting him to a newly Communist country, and when presented with Fidel and Robert Williams, LeRoi Jones didn’t have a counter-indoctrination in the primacy of democratic ideas to make him resent their revolutionary thinking. Instead, that domestic life he repeatedly described as passionless withered as he observed the unanimous youthful exuberance of the Cuban people, the real people who labor with their whole bodies, basking in the glory of their hard-won revolution. A less sincere man would have pretended he saw some tentativeness or misery in Cuba, but LeRoi couldn’t lie to himself—what he saw was joy and triumph and unbending solidarity. Because LeRoi was improvising his life, it made sense for him to land on the one with the rest of the free and young peoples of the world. Because most of us are following procedure and programs today, so many decades later, the society deeper in its decay, the bureaucracy more intimate and better at hiding and stylizing itself, it makes sense that our collective pitch is flustered with self-righteous democratic ideals. Today’s would-be black radicals are in big-name schools living on stipends or loans or salaries from those schools, while spouting off about the revolution, or they’re self-satisfied in organizations that try to solve racial warfare without addressing class warfare and end up endorsing Hillary Clinton, like good tokens. I don’t know if anyone’s going to Cuba or saying yes to anything that volatile on a whim, unless it’s for the clout or the resorts and mind-numbing ready-made vacation packages. I don’t know if anyone’s that spontaneous and undifferentiated anymore.

What LeRoi Jones and Amiri Baraka possess is, first, the good sense to be secular and still born again in this life, but also, enough love of beauty and truth to manage being true artists and demanding of themselves a clear and practiced ideological stance, one that implicates even the commodification of their own work. That tenacity, born of having nothing to gain or lose from the establishment, no nostalgia for the comfort of the rich university or the black capitalist lifestyle, comes with a fearlessness that today’s black literary figures really don’t access in the same way, and aren’t incentivised to support or respect or protect from the dangers that accompany it. We aren’t willing to get in trouble, that’s how deeply troubled we are. Our last radical almost died in solitary confinement humming Coltrane after the 1967 Newark Rebellion, during which police had targeted him and nearly beaten him to death. Our last radical was still raising and ruining hell in his 70s, accusing the state of every crime, teaching all of us who would listen how not to play the victim. Our last radical transcended the limits of form with the power of his substance and wrote in so many styles he shattered the idea of singularity or brand, ruined himself for black capitalism. We should thank him. Our last radical never led a revolution, but at least he wasn’t afraid of his own revolutionary shadow, at least he couldn’t be broken by abrupt and radical transformation into that shadow’s space, at least he had the good sense to spend the rest of his life after Cuba trying to incite revolt in every way he knew how—in himself, in his peers, in his community, in his pupils, in his family. Every day of Amiri’s life after Cuba was animated by that Revolutionary spirit..."
--by Harmony Holiday "The Last Black Radical: How Cuba Turned LeRoi Jones Into Amiri Baraka", Poetry Foundation, December 10, 2018

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/blog/open-door/80978/the-last-black-radical

“What’s Past is Prologue…”

All.

Please Note: I’m reprinting the entirety of this wonderful essay below because I know Amiri would have loved this piece and deeply appreciated the author for writing it…

Kofi

Open Door

The Last Black Radical: How Cuba Turned LeRoi Jones Into Amiri Baraka

by Harmony Holiday
December 10, 2018
Poetry Foundation

PHOTO: Leroi Jones. by Carl Van Vechten © Van Vechten Trust. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 1962

"Five hundred years from now, most of what we say today will seem like children’s singing." —Chairman Mao

"Do you wish America was a communist country? Sure, I wish the world was, actually." —Amiri Baraka in the USA, 2002

"I’m a poet, I write, that’s all, I’m not even interested in politics." —LeRoi Jones in Cuba, 1959

False Consciousness

It’s thrilling, sometimes, to overlook the obvious for long enough that the blink of awakening is so overdue for you when it arrives, sudden and almost criminal for being so distant before, that it feels choreographed somewhere in the ripping catatonic laughter of ghosts of the future, half minstrel/half sphinx, a cauldron of dread and readiness. I’ve been so used to heroic meaning what it means to me, accustomed to the happy fact that all of my heroes are black and crazy-blue and full of tender militancy and the most beautiful at being that—I’ve been so comfortable accumulating their data, mapping their endless battles, denouncing anyone who conspired against them, and blaming my impeccable taste for my love of difficult souls, that I forgot to ask why. Not only why that particular karass is most heroic to me or why that breed of black spirit makes me feel safest and proudest and most like myself in the world, but also why or how the black radical happens in the United States of America, a country that runs on trends and norms, the utter boredom of their recurrence blotted out by a collective cowardice that stops most everyone from breaking with tradition in deliberate or sustainable ways. We mostly accept that there’s a black radical tradition like sloganeers looking for mascots, the same manner in which we accept that there’s a literary cannon shooting its tantrum of blanks into our sense of purposed storytelling and poetics and rebellion through artistic expression. But what really constitutes that black radical tradition we so readily nod in, and how does such an unpopular club of outcasts and recluses and rebel geniuses elect its members, and how do the members find themselves ready candidates? What makes a black radical, what is her conduit? Who is a black radical? Why, how, for how long? Why do so many of us cling to rotting roots and avoid becoming so, avoiding the departure from any depleted source that is radicalization? And how many of the black radicals brave enough to be that survive their own awakening or hostile CIA spying and conspiring like Cointelpro or the blasphemy of the indifferent masses.

My favorite black radical, the artist formerly known as LeRoi Jones, I’d assumed until recently was born with a special capacity for revolutionary consciousness, not made that way. And I was wrong. LeRoi was a born artist, yes, a native poet in a legacy of black, such an avid Jazz listener that he was honorary musician, but before visiting Cuba in July of 1959, that was the extent of his radicalism. In his 20s, when it was up to him, LeRoi was a black man surrounded by white bohemians, married to one, not too concerned with politics, maybe even complacent about the state of the world, and trying to feign the feigned disaffectedness of some of his white peers. Sometimes his early poems seemed to lament his double consciousness, and assume that tone of elevated privacy that poems of privilege are so good at assuming when they pretend to let you in the room for a few lines, only to leave you more deeply attuned to your exile when they demand retreat. Any outrage LeRoi carried at this stage was subtle enough to seem distant from the flesh. He even spoke in a vacant, disembodied tone, then, left air in his esophagus for the elocution of his poetry, didn’t grind and groan language into the atmosphere but let it hang there in monotone as if he was the tarot’s hanged man and committed to that costume. This allowed him to recite poems like “Black Dada Nihilismus” and seem abstract when he promised: “may a lost god or Damballah rest or save us against the murders we intend, against his lost white children.” And it was beautiful, his broken style, a sunny hip and listless counter-violence that carried no true threat, and its neutered strut would have destroyed him, made him pseudo and self-loathing and impossible over time. A call LeRoi received one vague hungover Saturday afternoon, asking if he wanted to visit Cuba, was the beginning of his new birth. He was rescued from dilettantism by chance, intervened on, actualized.

‘Where had I obtained such a fake morality?’

The poet and part-time magazine publisher, with a young daughter and a Jewish wife, is 24 in the summer of 1959. He’s been from a Newark upbringing during which his parents, his mother a social worker and his father a postal worker, made sure he knew exactly why his grandfather had fled the South (Klansmen had set fire to his store), why they were stationed in this glib New Jersey city. LeRoi went from his Newark upbringing to Rutgers, then to Howard University, where he met poet and professor Sterling Brown, who inculcated him in black music and the style it suggests for literature and for thought formation. Leroi was given permission to improvise and respect himself for it by a writer and professor whom he respected and admired. Nonetheless, Amiri failed out of Howard because he had taken it as more of a social experiment than an academic one, learned more outside of the classroom than inside of it, was that kind of slick lawless genius, and out of humiliation for failing out and fear of disappointing his parents, LeRoi joined the Airforce, or “Error Farce” as he nicknamed it, and served as librarian on his base in Puerto Rico while enlisted, in order to continue his education, ordering every book he would have encountered from Howard to Harvard. He was ultimately discharged for reading Marx, but that’s all he was doing with that leftist energy at the time, reading it, bowing toward it in hesitant and studious reverence.

In Manhattan, after having been discharged, LeRoi worked at a bookstore and then eventually for a Jazz magazine called the Record Changer, and he lived alone in a coldwater flat in the Village. In this first life, LeRoi was in fervent pursuit of an informed literary bohemianism that felt real but also glamorous in its hyper-awareness of the honest efforts at racial and economic integration that the lifestyle fetishized. This usually meant black men with white women feeling a kind of dispassionate transgressiveness and afraid to ever give up their access to that whiteness for their hood pass, ever again. In the Village the young LeRoi Jones could sleep with white women and meet rich painters and discuss Jazz on the job. When his girlfriend and co-worker at the magazine discovered she was pregnant for a second time in their relationship, they married. “There was still no passion,” he promises self-consciously in his autobiography, “or maybe I didn’t understand passion then.” Their lives became a little more square with marriage. LeRoi got a little more serious about his writing and published his first poem, “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” in a small literary magazine before starting his own magazine, Yugen, where he would publish himself and poets he enjoyed, mostly Beats and other New Americans.

LeRoi Jones was on a path toward middle-class comfort with a stylish self-aware edge, and the rush he seemed to derive from his proximity to whiteness was palpable then, if only to him at first. I’m sure it would have grown more transparent or more like imitation, vain token ambition, assimilation. But the god in the machine wasn’t having that, not for him. In summer of 1959, LeRoi receives a call from Richard Gibson, a former CBS news correspondent who was fired shortly after forming the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Richard wants to know if our favorite black bohemian will replace Langston Hughes on a trip to Cuba, to ‘see what’s really going on down there.’ No poet turns down an adventure of that scale, even if it’s propped up by the State Department and precarious on several levels, even if he’s busy reveling in double hipness and liberated from passion by reason and responsibility and thinks he can make that last, and so his answer was yes, yes!

Through every phase of dutiful assimilation into the white superficially integrated art world LeRoi had infiltrated, and through every transformation leading up to the roles he played knowingly or otherwise in the Village, LeRoi Jones remained at heart and in spirit, sincere, almost desperate for ways to express that restless sincerity and also rescue himself from its peril: vulnerability. He had been doing what he thought he had to do to enact his version of the American Hustle, aka the American Dream Deferred, aka disappear into an idea of a black writer to become one. When this sudden invitation to Cuba came, it came as divine intervention at a time when he was not yet ruined by having too many white role models as a black man, though he had been dangling over the precipice of those seductive ruins. He still had room to become more like himself when the invitation to Cuba arrived like a messenger. And like one of his favorite musicians, Thelonious Monk, explains, “a genius is the one who is most like himself.” LeRoi still had the emotional space for the kind of salvation that only comes to sincere witnesses willing to testify, and be changed.

Tell Me About Harlem

LeRoi’s recountments of his voyage to Cuba and back are as a black Ulysses. The journey begins in a soothing monotony of mishaps as the group of black artists, intellectuals, and models, actors, philosophers, assembles, first at the airport in New York where they are told they have no tickets and have to battle and wait an entire day to board a flight, and then at the modest or borderline raggedy hotel in Cuba, where they begin making each other’s acquaintance and drinking and trying to figure out what kind of fair-played ambush Cuba and Richard Gibson plan for their souls, not realizing it’s already underway. On July 21, 1959, the Cuban Revolution was nominally complete. The rebel army defeated the Batista government and the rich landlords were being abruptly and unequivocally kicked off their land. The country was in the process of “Latifundia,” or land redistribution. No one could own more than 1000 acres and all peasant farmers would be given 66 acres of their own with which to reinvent their dreams. This meant no more monocrop of sugarcane, and automatically American Sugar was kicked out along with United Fruit, corporations that had raped the land and created a seasonal economy that gave farmers three months of underpaid work annually and left them to starve for the remaining months. LeRoi was learning all of this for the first time, and also watching the people of Cuba, supporters of the revolution, the same ones who the previous corporate-driven economy had strangled; so inspired, the air was electric, the chaos a kind of never ending hallucination, it hypnotized him out of that infatuation with stiff Western bohemianism and toward a love of what is real and penetrating.

He meets Robert Williams, a former head of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, a former advocate of nonviolence who changed his pacifist message after the cops violently attacked black citizens in that town. Robert suggested that all black people carry guns from that point on and was exiled for his call to arms. He meets Fidel Castro and hears him speak and asks, “what do you intend to do with this revolution?” “Whatever the people want,” is Fidel’s response, as he explains that he’s not a Communist but a Radical Humanist. On the 14-hour train ride to the small town outside of Havana, where LeRoi encounters Castro, along with 40,000 additional Cubans eagerly awaiting address from their new leader, LeRoi encounters a Mexican student with whom he talks the entire way to that town. He explains how he’s not into politics, how he’s a poet. He’s emphatically mocked and attacked for that dodgy American approach to aesthetics. You want to cultivate your soul? You want to cultivate your soul? Those around him ask, tauntingly. He’s called a Yanqui Imperialist, a sell-out, a hypocrite, a fool. He’s brought close to tears on that endless train. And then someone says, as a culminating jab at his character and fidelities: “Tell me about Harlem.”

When LeRoi gets back to Havana from that speech attended by thousands of singing and cheering Cuban citizens awaiting their new land in the warm rain, in the blistering heat—an American paper reads, “Cuban Speech Rained Out.” He runs away from the newstand and that propaganda like he’s being chased by his own ghost.

PHOTO: Amiri Baraka seated first on left from the head of the table. To his left is Robert F. Williams Photo courtesy of New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Something in the Way

It would have been impossible for anyone or anything to deliberately enter LeRoi Jones’s bohemian experiment in the Village and make him militant with a little proof of black and brown bodies suffering and resisting across the globe, or of those same bodies staging successful revolutions and claiming tangible Reparations. He would have rebutted them with talk of Zen and integration, defensive, defending his access to his passion-free romance with the Village and the bureaucratic tidiness of its hopeless mess. In 1957 the Civil Rights Movement truly began and maybe as it progressed so too would LeRoi Jones’s social and political consciousness have advanced, but even if that had been the case, LeRoi was, before Cuba, upholding a sense of performed decency he had borrowed from the white world, one that protected that world better than it did himself, one that left him politically barren. For example, while in Cuba Mr. Jones balked at their open carrying of weapons until it was explained to him that they had to be prepared for a counter-insurgency in the aftermath of such a young and controversial revolution. It would not have been far-fetched for Cubans to expect America to send troops to help reclaim its access to their fertile tropical paradise, in the name of freedom. So while intentionally attempting to radicalize LeRoi Jones by telling him about the Cuban Revolution and Fidel and the people carrying weapons in self-defense, might have failed, or worse, backfired, and inspired him to deeper allegiance with his borderline-bourgeois Greenwich Village lifestyle as a kind of poetics of pacifism—sending the same young poet to Cuba in the electrified aftermath of that Revolution to show him its most pragmatic achievements firsthand, ruined him for all forms of Americanism and made his bohemian experiment in the Village feel quaint and vapid. He returned not only radical but deeply unimpressed with what he had formerly seen as the apotheosis of creative expression in the United States. Revolution was now the most inspired creative act in his estimation, and literature would have to support its aims and help establish a revolutionary consciousness in the United States and globally. After Cuba, Amiri had to unequivocally choose a side, and the one he chose made him the foil to his own former self, his own worst enemy. The “Suicide Note” that was his first published poem became eerily accurate prophecy. LeRoi Jones died and Amiri Baraka would be his resurrection.

What was packaged as the Black Arts Movement and spearheaded by Amiri and Larry Neal wouldn’t begin until 1968, almost a decade after Cuba, but in the interim LeRoi becomes famous for a play he writes one night in a frenzy, Dutchman, a piece in which a black middle-class commuter named Clay is murdered on the New York Subway by an obsessive, histrionic white woman who tries to seduce him and, when she fails, kills him. LeRoi Jones as an identity is undergoing the same crisis his character Clay faces, and he too is killed with the fictive blade in the play. Not by domestic malice as much as by his soul’s backlash against his own former imitation of life. LeRoi wins an Obie award for Dutchman and between that recognition and the publication of his first book of poems in 1961, he can add fame to the series of traps rigging around him.

What’s different post-Cuba is that LeRoi Jones is militant now and armed with Marxist ideology. The traps are trivial compared to what he now knows and cannot unlearn. He now understands class struggle and how the concept of race blinds many to the tyranny of class within Monopoly Capitalism. Now he knows exactly how programmed and naïve he’s been to think that he could make his best work in some tragic state of ambivalence, now he realizes he must not only pick a side but reinvent the aesthetic of that side. He’s been shamed into awakening. He does want to cultivate his soul, but not in the naïve apolitical way he had pined for before Cuba. Now he longs for the soulful and radical decency he witnessed there. He writes a manifesto on what he calls the Revolutionary Theatre around this time, and begins to realize his vision of an artistic life that is not at all separate from the mundane, so that the theatre can be woven into small daily acts and with it Marxist ideology, militant black consciousness, the will to actual power, the pursuit of Revolution.

Ghosts of the Future

What I’d overlooked is the swift and ruthless moment of radicalization in the life of LeRoi Jones. I was inordinately ready to attribute his rare combination of lucid political courage and activism and unconditional love for black people to his hermetic artistic talent, to the abyss of genius, and I couldn’t see him for the foolish, tripping-over-himself, manchild he’d once been or comprehend how narrowly he’d escaped a lifetime of aimless recklessness, when he said yes to Cuba. And why it matters so much exactly how LeRoi Jones became Amiri Baraka is because his transformation reveals why he has no successor in any of us.

LeRoi wanted to be a writer in a time before the hyper-professionalisation of the craft. Black writers coming of age in the 1950s weren’t told they had to get MFAs. Baldwin hadn’t gone to college, Langston Hughes had dropped out. LeRoi had been at Howard with Toni Morrison, and though she’d finished, she hadn’t yet published her first book by the time he, a ‘drop-out,’ had. The most heralded writers were living adventurous and very raw social lives, not yet mediated by the demands of universities, and their art imitated their very singular modes of existence. The United States had yet to convince the entire population it was middle class and had a vested interest in the continuation of the status quo, so that these same writers were belligerently opposed to how their nation was being run, how their families and friends were being forced to live, in Harlem, in Paris, in Bohemia, everywhere capitalism was sold. Without the flimsy safety-net of bureaucratic writing and literature degrees, writers were not as busy pandering to that machine and could be honest about its dirty grooves. So instead of being in a classroom in a system scripted by Western ideology and pedagogy, instead of being indoctrinated in the merits of unconditional ‘objectivity,’ LeRoi was writing his own script, fumbling, but on his own terms. And so there was no sense of propriety or trepidation when the call came inviting him to a newly Communist country, and when presented with Fidel and Robert Williams, LeRoi Jones didn’t have a counter-indoctrination in the primacy of democratic ideas to make him resent their revolutionary thinking. Instead, that domestic life he repeatedly described as passionless withered as he observed the unanimous youthful exuberance of the Cuban people, the real people who labor with their whole bodies, basking in the glory of their hard-won revolution. A less sincere man would have pretended he saw some tentativeness or misery in Cuba, but LeRoi couldn’t lie to himself—what he saw was joy and triumph and unbending solidarity. Because LeRoi was improvising his life, it made sense for him to land on the one with the rest of the free and young peoples of the world. Because most of us are following procedure and programs today, so many decades later, the society deeper in its decay, the bureaucracy more intimate and better at hiding and stylizing itself, it makes sense that our collective pitch is flustered with self-righteous democratic ideals. Today’s would-be black radicals are in big-name schools living on stipends or loans or salaries from those schools, while spouting off about the revolution, or they’re self-satisfied in organizations that try to solve racial warfare without addressing class warfare and end up endorsing Hillary Clinton, like good tokens. I don’t know if anyone’s going to Cuba or saying yes to anything that volatile on a whim, unless it’s for the clout or the resorts and mind-numbing ready-made vacation packages. I don’t know if anyone’s that spontaneous and undifferentiated anymore.

What LeRoi Jones and Amiri Baraka possess is, first, the good sense to be secular and still born again in this life, but also, enough love of beauty and truth to manage being true artists and demanding of themselves a clear and practiced ideological stance, one that implicates even the commodification of their own work. That tenacity, born of having nothing to gain or lose from the establishment, no nostalgia for the comfort of the rich university or the black capitalist lifestyle, comes with a fearlessness that today’s black literary figures really don’t access in the same way, and aren’t incentivised to support or respect or protect from the dangers that accompany it. We aren’t willing to get in trouble, that’s how deeply troubled we are. Our last radical almost died in solitary confinement humming Coltrane after the 1967 Newark Rebellion, during which police had targeted him and nearly beaten him to death. Our last radical was still raising and ruining hell in his 70s, accusing the state of every crime, teaching all of us who would listen how not to play the victim. Our last radical transcended the limits of form with the power of his substance and wrote in so many styles he shattered the idea of singularity or brand, ruined himself for black capitalism. We should thank him. Our last radical never led a revolution, but at least he wasn’t afraid of his own revolutionary shadow, at least he couldn’t be broken by abrupt and radical transformation into that shadow’s space, at least he had the good sense to spend the rest of his life after Cuba trying to incite revolt in every way he knew how—in himself, in his peers, in his community, in his pupils, in his family. Every day of Amiri’s life after Cuba was animated by that Revolutionary spirit.

Venceremos

I keep trying to imagine Amiri’s story or one like it occurring today, keep fantasizing about a man or woman not coopted by righteous neoliberal agitprop by the time his mind starts forming visions of Reparations and land redistribution. I keep trying to imagine a Black American writer visiting Cuba today, 60 ridiculous American years after LeRoi’s visit to that idyllic island. Today’s approximation is at the beach, or some conference everyone’s paid to attend so that he can collect a stipend for teaching workshops, like the ones commodified at the colleges but with lower stakes. Fidel is long dead in his imagination and in fact, the artist keeps busy drinking rum at the resorts and sulking over a blue screen or filming a music video about Vodun, featuring a cast of nameless female muses gathered around a vintage car that they’ve been washing for an eternity. The female writer is one of those women or off in a national library somewhere, digging up information on some American poets in the 1960s who went to Cuba and came back swinging and even as she perfects her swing, it echoes a limp roar, gets lonely. There’s no current movement that isn’t mostly vanity or some other drab spectacle of emptiness. There’s no plan in place for our own cultural institutions, spaces not funded by corporations we then have to spend our energy pandering to, like helpless demagogues. We’ve objectified every level of life, put it all on the free market, the space for revolt that remains in our hearts is there because of a break, not the boon of an opening, our hearts carry a numb collective wound gained while fighting this blind war on our own psyches, and we constantly leak pieces of ourselves into the machine. How do we radicalize ourselves now, in this mire, with all of its trapdoors and skeletons and temptations to become another deluded anointed one, temptations to just run in place while saying all the right ‘progressive’ things? Do we even desire radical black consciousness, or have we really become fellow capitalists just fighting to be peaceful bureaucrats and own homes and feel that American sense of entitlement and tell ourselves how original we are when we make a new piece of art to sell and still don’t own any publishing companies, still don’t control its distribution.

I think a lot of the depression that haunts so many communities comes from the collective declaration of false desires, pretending we want to change the system when we’d rather blame it for our lives and use it for crumbs and comfort, pretending we want to be more than we are when the work of exceeding ourselves isn’t casual or prefabricated enough for our branded daily acts. To be radical, and militantly so, is to really admit and really feel that you don’t want the way of life gleaming in the American Promise, not as fetish or consolation prize or Reparations, that you want and need to believe in the prospect of a new world, new ways of being in this world, and that you are willing to look crazy as you work to embody that potentiality with each and every breath. Radicalism is extreme, it’s ridiculous, it’s devastating black magic, a spell that cannot be broken, not at all precious or safe or familiar or Yeezy season 4 or Bard or Harvard or even Harlem, not a kind of voguing despair but actual ecstatic despair or disgust that forces one to change or die. I don’t know anyone that beautiful and willing to be mistaken and taken under today. I don’t know anyone crazy and rational enough to really save the world from all of us. Our last black radical was that. Amiri Baraka was that. Fidel was that. Malcolm was that. Harriet was that. Nina was that. Sun Ra was that. All this could be that if we would stop pretending catastrophes are movies, stop pretending society's evils are vague fictions nobody is accountable for and that we can all be spectators instead of witnesses, so that no one ever testifies except as victim. Maybe soon we’ll have a new heroic screamer to lift that myth and teach us our real names, a new exodus to answer yes. A new reality is better than a new movie. I wanna be ready that day, ready to be that brave and helplessly sincere and real to myself; I want to be both screamer and she who must respond yes to her own awakening. I want to say I remember Cuba, I remember Haiti, I’ll remember April, I remember Amiri, I’ll remember Clay, is this tomorrow? Venceremos. I want to be radicalized by the urgency of now and found answering the unanticipated call, yes. This to me is our only chance at some semblance of salvation in the Western world, all of us becoming a version of the last black radical in a frenzied unison, all of us reaching the impossible edge of consciousness and surpassing it, discarding the rotting roots, bloody roots of this savage society, or using them as kindling.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Born in Waterloo, Iowa, poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday is the daughter of Northern Soul singer/songwriter Jimmy Holiday. Her father died when she was five, and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles. Holiday earned a BA in rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA at Columbia University. She is the author of Negro League Baseball (2011), winner of the Fence Books Motherwell Prize; Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues (Ricochet Editions, 2013), a “dos-a-dos” book featuring poetry, letters, and essays; and Hollywood Forever (Fence Books, 2017), which she is turning into an afroballet. She is currently working on a biography of Abbey Lincoln and an epic called M a a f A (2019), an exploration of reparations and the body.

Holiday has taught dance at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and is the founder of Mythscience, an arts collective devoted to cross-disciplinary work that helps artists re-engage with their bodies and the physical world in this so-called digital age, and the Afrosonics archive of jazz and everyday diaspora poetics. In 2013 she was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Los Angeles.

FOR AMIRI BARAKA (Part One)
1934-1964
by Kofi Natambu

Lula: And you went to a colored college where everyone thought they were Averell Harriman.
Clay: (laughs)...All except me.
Lula: And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
Clay: Well in college I thought I was Baudelaire...But I've slowed down since.
Lula: I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger.
--From Scene One of "Dutchman" by Leroi Jones (1964)

In the glowing infinitude of this very moment we search for the eternal end of all that brutally rules us our blind and dumb complicities listening for a raging and elegant voice cutting thru the terrifying aspects of this quotidian pain a voice rising spectacularly above the din of our fears and misgivings a voice crashing thru the ugly pretensions of our collective mythologies beating us down into the earth of our vanishing expectations a voice howling with the majesty of time's perfect entourage of memory a voice shapeshifting along the massive corridors of history's miseducated delusions a voice cracking thru the temporary footprints of our meandering desires a voice that paints a roaring canvas of liberatory options a tempestuous scene of possibilities a soaring rocketship of excoriating languages lifting us by the oppressive veils of our welldressed lies & always pretty definitions a voice rocking the air with the harmonic explosions of boldly expressive melodies erupting inside the piercing blueblack rhythms of our own souls beating a neon pathway to a stronger and clearer tomorrow inside the fitful declarations of yesterday a voice penetrating the phony blank monologues of our past sliding into the annihilating memories of today the evaporating atmosphere of the captivating love we pine for and never fulfill except in the most intimate and dizzying rooms of our stumbling lives a voice masquerading as the sweet and violent masks of our magnificent reality bought and sold by demons in the withering disguise of wisdom and the poisonous rewards of our enemies a voice racing thru the prison of art without politics politics without art politics and art without revolution a voice reiging in the muscular and delicate filligrees of hot and cool lyricisms a voice grooving to the electric manifestations of rampaging collective and individual lights dialectically merging and dialogically communicating within and without the breakneck syllogisms of our very vernacular reminders and strutting peacock modernisms and their postmodern flunkies breakdancing to airborne strategic lindyhop manuevers while bebopping furiously with sensually slow dragsters "hunting for those heads on the wall”

https://vimeo.com/107619665?autoplay=1&muted=1&stream

THE BLUES PEOPLE 50 YEARS LATER

SchomburgCBFS

Inspired by Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), a generation of scholars in the field of Jazz and Blues music history and criticism was born, creating a legitimate space in the academy for the serious study of African American music. Joining Amiri Baraka in this conversation-- reflecting on the years between Baraka’s Blues People and his Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Music -- will be two major scholars in this field: Ingrid Monson and John Szwed.

Fifty years ago Blues People was the first book-length history written by an African American that addressed the social, musical, economic, and cultural influences of the blues and jazz on American history. His approach to music criticism was different from anything else that existed when he first began writing in the 1950s and 60s, partly because he was the only black writer in a field of white critics. Furthermore, he was not simply describing the music, but he was also fashioning a type of prose writing that was itself an artistic performance about music.

Vimeo Video length: 38 minutes and 30 seconds

[Uploaded on September 30, 2014]

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka is one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers. With the beginning of Black Civil Rights Movements during the sixties, Baraka explored the anger of African-Americans and used his writings as a weapon against racism. Also, he advocated scientific socialism with his revolutionary inclined poems and aimed at creating aesthetic through them. Amiri Baraka’s writing career spans over nearly fifty years and has mostly focused on the subjects of Black Liberation and White Racism. He is counted among the few influential political activists who have spent most of their lifetime fighting for the rights of African-Americans.

Ingrid Monson
Harvard University

Dr. Ingrid Monson is the Quincy Jones Professor of Jazz at Harvard and the author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call out to Jazz and Africa. She has a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Musicology from NYU, and a B.M. from New England Conservatory. Professor Monson won the Sonneck Society's 1998 Irving Lowens Prize for the best book in American music for her 1996 Saying Something, Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. She was also a founding member of the nationally known Klezmer Conservatory Band, and plays trumpet with jazz and salsa bands. She is working on a book on the music of the African Diaspora.

John Szwed
Columbia University

Dr. John Szwed is the Director of Jazz Studies at Columbia where he is also Professor of Music and Jazz Studies and the author of Jazz 101. Dr. Szwed’s publications range from anthropological studies of Newfoundland and the West Indies to record liner notes and jazz journalism. Before he joined Columbia, Szwed taught Anthropology, African American Studies, and Film Studies for many years at Yale University, and also received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. He is President of the non-profit music production company Brilliant Corners, which is based in New York City.

Video Recording:

https://vimeo.com/107619665

Inspired by Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), a generation of scholars in the field of Jazz and Blues music history and criticism was born, creating a legitimate space in the academy for the serious study of African American music. Joining Amiri Baraka in this conversation-- reflecting on the years between Baraka’s Blues People and his Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Music -- will be two major scholars in this field: Ingrid Monson and John Szwed.

Fifty years ago Blues People was the first book-length history written by an African American that addressed the social, musical, economic, and cultural influences of the blues and jazz on American history. His approach to music criticism was different from anything else that existed when he first began writing in the 1950s and 60s, partly because he was the only black writer in a field of white critics. Furthermore, he was not simply describing the music, but he was also fashioning a type of prose writing that was itself an artistic performance about music.

"Why is We Americans?"
by Kofi Natambu

Amiri Baraka reads this poem live on HBO
Season 1 Episode 4 of Def Poetry Jam in 2002:

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ziRjhAgTO8

“What’s Past is Prologue…"

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEROI JONES
by Amiri Baraka
Freundlich Books, 1984

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEROI JONES
by Amiri Baraka
Lawrence Hill Books, 1997

Chapter Seven:

The Black Arts: Harlem, Politics, Search for a New Life

The Cuban trip was a turning point in my life. Langston, Jimmy Baldwin, and John Killens were supposed to go, but didn’t. I was in a group that included Sarah Wright, the novelist, and her husband. Ed Clark, the painter, whom I knew. Harold Cruse, the writer, whom I also knew. (I’d met Harold in my MacDougal Street days, often in the Caf, Figaro at Bleecker and McDougal. He lived then in a furnished room on West 23rd or West 14th and was always complaining about how Broadway producers were turning down musicals he was writing.) Julian Mayfield and his wife, Ana Codero, a doctor, born in Puerto Rico. Also with our party was a man I didn’t know until then, Robert Williams. It was Williams who had organized the most militant NAACP chapter in the States, a chapter composed of black workers and returning veterans, in Monroe, North Carolina. They’d had “wade-ins” to integrate the pool in Monroe, and Rob had summoned black militant attorney Conrad Lynn down to North Carolina to defend a ten-year-old boy who had been locked up for kissing an eight-year-old white girl. Rob had also organized a self-defense group in Monroe and when he made the statement in 1959, after a white rapist of a black woman had been freed by an all-white jury, that blacks should “meet violence with violence,” he was summarily ditched by Uncle Roy and the NAACP. Later, Rob led a group of armed blacks to surround a group of menacing Klansmen, disarm them, take off their hoods, and send them scurrying back into their rat holes.

He was wearing a big straw hat like a campesino (Cuban farmer) when I met him, with a wispy tip of beard. He was a big man, maybe six feet three inches and about 240 pounds, imposing, strong-looking. One never doubted that, aroused, Rob could be a mean mf.

Traveling with us, as well, were John Henrik Clarke, the historian, plus some other people — a black model, two strange-looking sisters who were members, along with Gibson, of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and a journalist from a Philadelphia newspaper. (For a detailed account of this trip, see “Cuba Libre,” an essay in Home: Social Essays.

But we went to Cuba (this was 1959), after a false start courtesy of the U.S. government, and we stayed a couple days in Havana talking to various people, meeting various Cuban and Latin intellectuals and officials. I met the great Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, who asked me straight out where was Langston and did I think that Langston had gotten more conservative. I smiled, but I did not know then that Langston had testified, under duress, before HUAC, denouncing some of his own earlier work, to keep great patriots like the filthy cracker bastard James Eastland off his ass.

I met Pablo Armando Fernández, the poet, and people at La Casa de Cuba, an arts center. We also visited various ministries and got lectured to about what Cuba was trying to do. I talked to a young minister in the National Agrarian Reform Institute, António Nuñez Jiménez, and was very much impressed. And then we traveled, with thousands of other people, on a slow train to Oriente Province, on the eastern tip of the island, where the revolution was born. I met intellectuals from all over Latin America, including a young woman, Rubi Betancourt, from Yucatán and Jaime Shelly, a poet from Mexico. These young people assaulted my pronouncements about not being political. It was the first time I’d been taken on so thoroughly and forcefully and by people my own age, my contemporaries. I was not Eisenhower or Nixon or Faubus, I protested, I was a poet. And so you want to write your poetry and that alone, while most of the world is suffering, your own people included. It is bourgeois individualism, they screamed. That is all it is, bourgeois individualism. For twelve or fourteen hours on the train I was assailed for my bourgeois individualism. And I could see, had seen, people my own age involved in actual change, revolution. In my sinister American cynicism, my inherited world-weary arrogance of theoretical know-it-all-ism, I was little better than my friend who’d said, “I hate guys in uniforms.” In fact, I was the same.

I could fight back with what I knew of my own seeming disagreement with my U.S. peers, how I did have sensitivity to what was going on. But that seemed puny in the face of what I’d already seen in Cuba and in the faces of these young Latino activists and intellectuals, already politicized, for whom Cuba was the first payoff of a world they had already envisioned and were already working for. I was the oddball, the weary traveler/tourist from the U.S. of A. As much hot hatred as I could summon for the U.S., its white supremacy, its exploitation, its psychological torture of schizophrenic slaves like myself, I now had to bear the final indignity—which made my teeth grate violently, even in reflection — the indignity and humiliation of defending its ideology, which I was doing in the name of Art. Jesus Christ!

In Oriente, we went up into the Sierra Maestra for the celebration of the July 26 invasion of Moncada by Fidel Castro and his forces, who called themselves the July 26th Movement. There were hundreds of thousands of people up there. It could have been easily a million people. We trucked and walked and wound up and up. I rode partway with Françoise Sagan, the French novelist, who had attendants everywhere, befitting her great celebrity. I had known her from the covers of her books I read down in Puerto Rico in the error farce. All of us were thirsty, the hot sun whipped our ass, plus the long walk. But we made it up to where the celebration was held. And I heard Fidel Castro speak for perhaps two hours nonstop, relating the entire history of the revolution to the campesinos, soldiers, intellectuals, and foreign visitors. I even got to meet him and say a few words. It was a rare moment in one’s life and if the harangues of Rubi and Jaime and the others weren’t enough, this final stroke was, my head spinning with recognition, revelation, and the hot-ass sun.

We had a few more days in Havana. I hung out with Rob Williams one day, and everywhere he went people in the street cheered him. The Cubans had made his confrontations with the Klan and yanqui racismo known to people throughout the island, even though in the U.S. they tried to play it down.

Even when he was in Havana, Rob got word from the Cubans that the Klan was stirring again, trying to intimidate his family. Rob, with me trailing along with him, went to see the U.S. ambassador. Rob was wearing a shoulder holster and his language was so hot you could hear him through the door. “If the U.S. government don’t protect them, then I got people there who will.” (And he did!)

A year or so later the government framed Rob in the famous Monroe kidnap case, when Rob saved two whites who’d wandered into the black community, during a shootout with the racist state police, from being jacked up by a crowd of blacks incensed by the state police’s racist terror tactics. He went to Cuba, Algeria, and finally China, where he never ceased to be a thorn in the U.S. racists’ side with his militant publication The Crusader. When we got back to the U.S., the newspapers even pretended that the Cuban celebration had been rained out.But I carried so much back with me that I was never the same again. The dynamic of the revolution had touched me. Talking to Fidel or Juan Almeida, the black commander of the revolutionary army, or to the young minister of agrarian reform, Nuñez Jiménez, or Jaime or Rubi or Pablo Fernández. Seeing youth not just turning on and dropping out, not just hiply cynical or cynically hip, but using their strength and energy to change the real world — that was too much. The growing kernel of social consciousness I had was mightily fertilized by the visit.

When I returned, I was shaken more deeply than even I realized. The arguments with my old poet comrades increased and intensified. It was not enough just to write, to feel, to think, one must act! One could act.

First, I wrote an essay about my Cuban experience, “Cuba Libre.” I remembered that the Cubans had changed the name of the Hilton Hotel in Havana to Havana Libre, and a U.S. telephone operator, in making the hookup of a call there, insisted the hotel was still the Havana Hilton. But the. Cuban operator would have none of it. “Havana Libre!” she shouted. “Get used to it!” That was the spirit I wanted to invest in the essay. It won an award after being published in the Evergreen Review. The award was $300 and was the most money I’d ever gotten for something I’d written.

At the same time I had begun a long prose work. It was as if I wanted to shake off the stylistic shackles of the gang I’d hung with and styled myself after. I consciously wrote as deeply into my psyche as I could go. I didn’t even want the words to “make sense.” I had the theme in my mind. My early life, in Newark, at Howard, in the air force, but the theme was just something against which I wanted to play endless variations. Each section had its own dynamic and pain. Going so deep into myself was like descending into hell. I called it The System of Dante’s Hell.

I would focus on my theme and then write whatever came into my mind as a result of that focus. I called them (later) “association complexes.” I was tearing away from the “ready-mades” that imitating Creeley or Olson provided. I’d found that when you imitate people’s form you take on their content as well. So I scrambled and roamed, sometimes blindly in my consciousness, to come up with something more essential, more rooted in my deepest experience. I thought of music, I thought of myself as an improvising soloist. I would go into almost a trancelike state, hacking deeper and deeper, my interior rhythms dancing me on. Only in the last section is there what I called “fast narrative,” something approaching a conventional narrative. It was almost like what Césaire had said about how he wrote Return to My Native Land. That he was trying to break away from the heavy influence that French Symbolist poetry had on him. So he decided to write prose to stop writing poetry. And what he came up with was a really profound new poetry, showing how even the French language could be transformed by the Afro-Caribbean rhythms and perception. (Though I did not find this out about Césaire until almost twenty years later!)

I wrote in jagged staccato fragments until at the end of the piece I had come to, found, my own voice, or something beginning to approximate it. We were also going through the process of moving. Another little girl child had been born, Lisa, so we had two little girl babies. We were moving to East 14th Street, between First and Second Avenues, into a terrible though huge barnlike apartment over a Gypsy storefront. It was not the sleek, quiet West Side apartment in Chelsea. We moved into the grimy East Side just before the still vague East Village changed abruptly into Chelsea East. Our lease had run out on West 20th Street. The rent had been high for us in the first place, but now I had also gotten fired from my job for having gone off to Cuba. I had to get back on unemployment, so there was no way we could support West 20th Street.It was a weird time for me altogether, what with the political impulses the Cuba trip had set in motion. There was an unused metal sign over the Gypsies’ place on which in some critical moment in U.S.-Cuban relations I’d painted “Cuba Si-Yanqui No!”

When I finished Dante’s Hell, it was Lucia to whom I thought I should show it, and she thought it should be published immediately. I also showed it to a friend, John Fles, who was publishing a one-shot anthology of new work, along with Artaud, whom Fles dug. It was called The Trembling Lamb. I felt, then, that I was in motion, that my writing, which I’d been deadly serious about, was now not just a set of “licks” already laid down by Creeley, Olson, etc., but was moving to become genuinely mine. I felt that I could begin to stretch out, to innovate in ways I hadn’t thought of before. And in all my poetry which comes out of this period there is the ongoing and underlying contention and struggle between myself and “them” that poetry and politics, art and politics, were not mutually exclusive.

Lana wanted to be a “mistress.” She took that as a real identity, Brook Farm, I’d thought before, when I discovered the Nellie-Luke Sashimi hookup.

When I discovered that Luke and Nellie were still seeing each other, I just left, moved out, and Lana, a young dancer I’d met, wanted me to move in with her. Lucia didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but she was half hip to the Lana scam, so we were not as close as before. I’d picked up the phone one day and it was Luke, maybe drunk, trying to disguise his Asian accent, like an alligator “disguised” in a tuxedo.

Nellie had started work again at the Sectarian Review and we’d hired a West Indian woman to watch the kids all day, while Nellie worked and I wrote. But now I just split. I said a few words to Nellie, gathered my shit, and was gone. Luckily I had found a place to sublet that was just three blocks up the street on East 17th Street, in an elevator building, one of the old luxury-type apartments. A young white piano player who was working with Jackie McLean was splitting and he wanted to get rid of the place, so I leaped on it. It was a nice little three-room spot, between Second and Third Avenues, the only run-down-looking building in a block of extremely high-priced luxury apartments.

Lana started coming around to that apartment, spending the night (when she wasn’t hooked up to Butler). She was hinting that she wanted to move in with me, but I wasn’t hearing those hints. The solitude, being a young man with some knowledge of the town now, not thrown back and forth at the whim of whoever as guides, was sweet.

During this period, I’d tried to start a group known as the Organization of Young Men (OYM). It was one fledgling effort at building some political consciousness downtown. And not so strangely, it was all black. Not that I’d planned it that way, but that is who was in it. And not so strangely, almost all of those in it had white wives or lovers. Archie Shepp, Steve Cannon, Leroy McLucas, Walter Bowe, Harold Cruse, Calvin Hicks, A. B. Spellman, Bobb Hamilton, and a few other folks. We weren’t certain just what we wanted to do. It was more like a confirmation of rising consciousness. We issued at least one statement, but the sense of it was that we knew it was time to go on the offensive in the civil rights movement. We did not feel part of that movement. Most of us were isolated now from the mainstream of the black community and we did not reflect, in an undistortedway, that consciousness. Our consciousness, in the main, was that of young black intellectuals “integrated” to within a hair’s breadth of our life. We talked vaguely about going “uptown” to work. But what work we did not really understand. We had a few meetings, but then Calvin Hicks had already organized a stronger, somewhat more experienced group, the name of which came to be On Guard. It was the same kind of group, mainly black intellectuals living downtown, many of whom were married to or “going with” white women. And in that organization, it was an unwritten rule that our wives, lovers, etc., weren’t to go uptown with us. The exception to this was Hicks’ wife, who was explained as “an Egyptian,” though to the untrained or spontaneous eye, she looked extremely white.

Finally, after a few clandestine visits back to East 14th Street, I abruptly decided to go back. Why? I can’t really say. Perhaps a sense of family, a feeling of being somehow insecure living “by myself,” or whatever. But I came back, to much hand wringing and moaning from Lana and the old goodbye to some others.

The West Indian woman was still “minding” the children while I tried to write. One time she took them to the park that is part of the Stuyvesant Town apartments, and while sitting on a bench next to many black “governesses” with their lily-white charges, she was asked did those children live in the complex. These security guards knew they didn’t, because at the time Stuyvesant Town was lily white. So they asked Miss Brown to leave!

I had also become a part of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee under Richard Gibson’s urging. And this brought me further into the world of political commitment. It was as if I had two distinct lives, one a politically oriented life, with a distinct set of people I knew and talked to, the other the artsy bohemian life of the Village.

Zazen had come, finally, to an end. So Lucia and I began to put out a small newsletter, which would come out monthly or thereabouts, called The Fleeting Bear. It published poetry, reviews, snippets of essays, fiction, and was distributed to whoever wanted it for a contribution of one kind or another.

Working with the On Guard people, I would go uptown. We had opened a small office on 125th Street and got involved in a few struggles. The most important battle we took up was when the government tried to frame Rob Williams. We set up a committee, the Monroe Defense Committee, to raise money and put out propaganda about the case. We ran into trouble with the Socialist Workers Party, which wanted to have some grip on the group. I was very naive about sectarian left politics and didn’t really understand what was going on. All I knew is that the SWP wanted to put a woman named Berta Greene on the MDC and Richard Gibson was always complaining about the SWP and, particularly, Berta Greene as interfering obstructionists to the work he was trying to do with Fair Play. We met one day at my house on 14th Street. Calvin, Virginia Hamilton, Archie, and some others and SWP people gave us a check for a couple hundred dollars and wanted to talk about Berta’s being an officer on the committee. We went into secret caucus and subsequently told them we didn’t want Berta on the committee. So SWP took their check back. What was so wild was that some of us were talking about how we didn’t want white people on the committee but we were all hooked up to white women and the downtown Village society. Such were the contradictions of that period of political organization.

But Rob’s frame-up brought us into that struggle in a big way. We put out a little publication called In/Formation, which talked about the case and which we began to distribute mostly downtown. We had the uptown office, but most of us (all of us) still lived downtown.

The SWP started a rival defense committee, as they usually do when they cannot steer things their way. So the two defense committees struggled with each other and at the same time we were trying to get out information about Rob’s case. I became a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and eventually chairman of the New York chapter. I started also to speak at different places around the city about Cuba and also the Williams case. Both these issues had caught the imagination of a certain sector of young people of my generation — harbingers of things to come. I began meeting a lot of different kinds of people than the sequestered artistic types I’d been running with, but I was still very much a part of a downtown art scene, though the positions and opinions I was beginning to take were always opposed by most of my artsy world. “Cuba Libre” was reprinted by the Fair Play Committee right after it appeared in Evergreen Review late in 1960.

In some ways the East 14th Street apartment was the scene of even larger bashes than those on West 20th Street. The West 20th Street sets were, in the main, in-house kinds of things — close cutthroat friends. On East 14th Street we had one New Year’s Eve party that looked like it had half the Village there. And there was not only anything people wanted to drink or smoke (and whatever they wanted to snort somewhere in one of the rooms) but we had taken to buying these amyl nitrate capsules, which were normally used to revive heart attack victims. Cracking the glass tube inside a bright yellow net and whiffing that boy gave one of the oddest kinds of instant high. It made things hilarious (do people with heart attacks feel instantly sad?), but its effects were very short lived — perhaps a minute. For this reason people were always whipping out the yellow-clothed capsule, popping it, and falling all over cracking up. People who didn’t know what was happening thought we were nuts.

The Fleeting Bear was coming out regularly and became the talk of our various interconnected literary circles. It was meant to be “quick, fast, and in a hurry.” Something that could carry the zigs and zags of the literary scene as well as some word of the general New York creative ambience. Lucia and I were very serious about it, sending it to anyone who wanted it or who we thought should get it and asking for any contribution they wanted to give. Usually that meant people might drop a dollar on you when you couldn’t possibly have “charged” a dollar for that skimpy little thing. But the publication had real impact and influence and was greatly talked about. And though it had a regular circulation of about 300, those 300 were sufficiently wired for sound to project the Bear’spresence and “message” (of a new literature and a new criticism) in all directions.

Fleeting Bear 9, however, got another response. We were sending it to a couple of people in the slam and the authorities intercepted that issue, which contained Burroughs’ take-off on Roosevelt, called “Routine: Roosevelt after the Inauguration” (an excerpt from Naked Lunch), plus a dramatic section of my own Dante called “The Eighth Ditch,” about a homosexual rape in the army. In the middle of the night (about 3 A.M.) treasury agents, FBI, and police showed at East 14th Street. I was awakened with these nabs standing over my head. Nellie told them not to wake the children and they threatened to arrest her. One of them asked me, “Is that your wife?” Just to show that they did not like the interracial business.

I was being charged with sending obscene materials through the mail. So you can see that certainly was another day, just a little over thirty years ago. The words used in those two pieces can probably be found in most films released now. I was locked up but got a lawyer, and when Lucia turned herself in later, we were both released on our own recognizance.

I defended myself before the grand jury, however. I read all the good parts of Joyce’s Ulysses and Catullus aloud to the jury and then read Judge Woolsey’s decision on Ulysses, which described obscene literature as being arousing “to the normal person.” I went on, saying, “But I know none of you [grand jury] were aroused by any of these things.” They dismissed the case.

During those East 14th Street days, Timothy Leary showed up. He was teaching up at Harvard and doing research on hallucinogens; he and another guy (Alpert) who became a guru and changed his name to Baba Ram Dass. Leary was floating around the downtown artistic community handing out the drug psilocybin, also called “the magic mushroom,” to get the reaction of writers and painters and dancers and musicians to hallucinogenic drugs. LSD was a later development of this same stuff.

I had my reservations about taking that bullshit. My rationale was that while traditional drugs (bush, scag, cocaine) were OK with me, I didn’t know anything about this kind of shit Leary was pushing. But I went for it anyway and took some of it. I was high about eight hours! And then when I thought I was down I had a relapse. The shit made stuff seem like it was jumping around on my desk and in the house. Papers, pictures, furniture all would suddenly leap to another spot or jump up and down. After a while I began begging to come down (in my head). And then aloud: “I wish this shit would go away!” Finally, it was late at night and I thought I had shook the shit off. So I went for a walk up First Avenue, which was just a block away. When I got up in the 20s, suddenly I started hearing these wild screams and moans. “Goddammit, that shit is back again. Goddammit!” I was whining out loud, but then I looked up and I was walking right near Bellevue and it was the noise the nuts were making. I never used it again, Leary or not!

I had gotten together enough poems for a first book and was thinking of publishing it through Totem. But I hit on an idea of getting Ted Wilentz and his brother, Eli, who ran the Eighth Street Bookstore, to co-publish with us. They had started a publishing company, Corinth Books, to publish a book that Eli had done on New York City history. Ted was a good friend of Allen Ginsberg and generally a warm and fairly knowledgeable person about the new literary scene, since people were always coming into his place mashing new stuff on him to sell out of his store. We’d always got a good response with Zazen and the Totem books and he carried much of the new literature from all over the country. So in 1961 my first book of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, was published.

The Totem-Corinth collaboration published a number of significant books. Empty Mirror, early poems by A.G.; Myths and Texts, Gary Snyder; Like I Say, Philip Whalen; Second Ave., Frank O’Hara; Hands Up, Ed Dorn; Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Kerouac; Gilbert Sorrentino’s Black and White. Plus Totem, by itself, published Max Finstein’s Savonarola’s Tune and Charles Olson’s seminal work, Projective Verse, which was for many of us the manifesto of a new poetry.

But soon we had to move again. This time the landlords wanted to tear down the old building to make way for a new apartment complex. So the apartment-hunting routine had to begin again. I was still not doing anything but writing. Nellie still worked for the Sectarian Review, so that was the steady money; other than that, there was, for a time, my unemployment check. Then only some other very little bits and pieces. I was doing articles on music for Metronome in its new reemergence and that provided a few pennies here and there. I had even had a cover article, “Blues, Black and White America,” which tried to look at the music from a historical perspective. The editors wanted to come on more radical than the dreary Downbeat. One of the editors was a friend of Lenny Bruce’s. The cover of the issue in which I had the big article showed a white referee on a football field kicking a black baby over the goalposts!

But I was writing reviews consistently for Metronome, and another publication was initiated, first by Marc Schleifer and later by Lita Hornick, called Kulchur. The title was taken from Pound’s title A Guide to Kulchur. Schleifer was a young Jew who had come out of the University of Pennsylvania as an arch-conservative, then was transformed by the various Village forces and became more radical than most of my other colleagues. He was later to interview Rob Williams in Monroe and publish the introduction to the first edition of Rob’s important work Negroes with Guns, which was one of the first contemporary statements in support of black self-defense. Schleifer also went to Cuba later and, finally, during the intense period of estrangement between certain blacks who had been living downtown and their erstwhile white friends, Schleifer went to Algeria, then Egypt, changed his name to Abdullah, and became a Muslim!

Lita Hornick was the wife of Morton (“Mortie”) Hornick, who was, when I met him, the president of the Young Presidents Club, whose members had to be presidents of large corporations before they got to be thirty. He died a few years ago. They lived up on Park Avenue, but Lita had a literary interest (which she still maintains), and becoming familiar with the Beat scene and with people like Frank O’Hara and myself, she decided she wanted to buy Marc’s magazine. For a time, Schleifer continued as editor, then Mrs. Hornick took over. Sorrentino was poetry editor; O’Hara was arts editor; I was music editor. The magazine was more focused on commentary than poetry or fiction, though it did have a drama issue, which I edited. And while there was no money being made, it offered still another vehicle for expression of our broad common aesthetic. It allowed us to resume our attack on the academy, for instance, at an even higher level than Zazen provided. Plus, our editorial meetings at the Hornicks’ were always a treat for us downtown frayed-at-the-edges semi-bohemians passing into the Park Avenue pad to view some sho nuff wealth. Mortie Hornick and I always had a running banter going, he needling me because he knew I always talked against the rich, and me accepting the needling good-naturedly, but still adding a little doo doo in the contest.

I had hit upon another idea in our search for some dust, however. I made a copy of Nellie’s key to the Sectarian Review, and unbeknownst even to her, I began to make clandestine visits to the offices. My object was to cop the review copies of books they always had there, or I figured they’d have, and resell them to various bookstores. I figured they’d take the books they were going to review and send them out. But the other books, the big art books and coffee-table books, plus the various kinds of fiction and nonfiction in which I knew the Sectarians had no interest, I’d drop into my army gas mask bag and slide on out before the whole building closed. I used to make this move about once a week, more if there was a big crop. I never took too many, since I didn’t want to get anyone suspicious or Nellie fired. But I’d wait till I knew she was gone, and she was the last one in the office. The two famous editors rarely came in. Then I’d take the books to Strand or Phoenix or Briggs’ Books and Things and get something like 25 cents on the dollar. If a book sold for $20 or $25, I’d really be in clover.

I used to get review records normally as a reviewer for Metronome, Martin Williams’ Jazz magazine, and even Downbeat occasionally. I’d sell these as well, if I didn’t want them, and get the same price, 25 cents on the dollar.

A small crisis arose when the deadline to move out of the East 14th Street barn came up and we still didn’t have a place. Finally, we had to move one way or another. Fee Dawson, by now, had moved into a loft, down at the other end of West 20th Street, right near Fifth Avenue. He was leaving to visit, but the loft had nothing in it really. I’d found a small group of rooms, the strangest-looking little apartment I’d ever seen, down on Cooper Square, a few steps from the Five Spot. Though the Five Spot was moving now too, up a couple blocks away to the corner of Cooper Square and St. Marks Place. The apartment had concrete walls and little winding halls, and a room that would be the kitchen with windows that opened out onto a roof. It was a wild place, but it needed work badly. It could not be lived in by small children. It needed doors and pipes for bathroom and kitchen, for tubs, commode, and stoves. It also was filled with debris. I found a guy who would do the work of fixing up the joint if I agreed to help him so he didn’t have to pay a helper. Nellie would go to Newark to stay with my family, with the two babies. I would stay at Fee’s place while this was going on.

At this same time, an old girlfriend of Jack Kerouac’s, Joyce Glassman, now Joyce Johnson, had become an editor at William Morrow. She told me if I submitted an outline for a book, something like the article I had published in Metronome, “Blues, Black and White America,” she could get it published, since some folks up at Morrow liked the article. I did an outline, Morrow liked it, I got a small advance — enough to pay Jeff, the carpenter, give Nellie some money, and at the same time have a little to sustain me at Fee’s loft. And so I began work, at the same time as we were fixing up the loft-like apartment on Cooper Square, on the book Blues People.

The feeling that went with moving plaster and garbage all day and helping with the plumbing and carpentry and in the evenings working feverishly on Blues People was elating. After a week or so I didn’t have to do so much to help the carpenter, so I could spend the whole day doing the research, reading, and writing. I’d go by Cooper Square every day to check on the progress and call Nellie about what was happening. She’d come over a day or so every week.

In a month plus a few days, the apartment, such as it was, was finished. Coooper Square is really a continuation of the Bowery and the section between the Bowery and Third Ave., they are the same street. I had made great gains on the book, gotten my basic premise together, and was clear about how I wanted to flesh out the Metronome article. In the next few months I was to finish it. The Cooper Square apartment had an ambience, a sense of place, as Charles Olson would have called it, that was unlike either West 20th Street or East 14th Street. Perhaps, for one thing, it was my own deepening sense of myself that was at large within those rooms: what the Cuban trip had begun to urge onto the surface, something that had existed in me as seed, as idea, as perception still to be rationalized. The political work that I was doing more of meant also that I had to offer another face to the world; maybe I was becoming someone else. Fair Play, On Guard, Organization of Young Men. I began to feel, even though I was definitely still a member of the downtown set, somewhat alienated from my old buddies. Perhaps alienated is too strong a word, but I peeped some distance had sprung up between us. I was writing the poems that would come out in a couple years as the book The Dead Lecturer, and again and again they speak of this separation, this sense of being in contradiction with my friends and peers.

For another thing, my writing on black music had increased in very large measure and, for certain, that was an answered promise that went back to my youth as a set of fresh ears trailing across Belmont Avenue listening to black blues and knowing that was the real language of the place! I even got something like a gig about this time. Esmond Edwards, the A&R man for Prestige records, gave me a gig writing liner notes. I got a disc about two or three times a month, and for each set of notes I wrote I got $50! I wrote liners for Gene Ammons, Shirley Scott, Arnett Cobb, Willis “Gatortail” Jackson, and many many others. The Blues People research also meant that I had to study not only the history of African American music but also the history of the people. It was like my loose-floating feelings, the subordinated brown that was hooked to the black and the blues, were now being reconstructed in the most basic of ways.

I was still drifting around the Village hooked up to any number of completely transitory, mainly white, female liaisons. But even that was somewhat altered. For one thing, I got involved with this beautiful black woman who was the mistress (on the real side) of this rich Village publisher. She was so out she’d go by there and get money from this dude and then we’d take off and go somewhere. In one sense, I guess I identified with her, because she seemed completely sealed off in an all-white world. He, the publisher, handled her like expensive merchandise. And one night, we look up, and we’re the only black people at this book party, and our eyes collided so heavily I swore someone could hear it. But she was even more confused than I. One day she comes to my house on East 14th Street, with some friend of hers, under this completely phony guise, and she says something to Nellie and wants me to leave the house and go with her at that moment. That was a little out even for me. She was still chippying around as an omnisexual or whatever, so our thing was short-lived. The wild thing is that one night, maybe six or seven years later, I see her at some function and she’s become a Muslim, a member of the Nation of Islam. We said nothing to each other, we even pretended not to recognize each other. But that really twisted me up.

Another kind of salon or circle began to form at Cooper Square. The tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp moved downstairs sometime after we did. At that time he was completely unknown, his first glimmer of recognition was playing in the jazz group that was part of the play by Jack Gelber, The Connection, which opened at the Living Theater, Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s avant-garde theater.

The altoist Marion Brown was also part of that circle. He had come up from Atlanta University to the big city and was still not certain he even wanted to play music. He was into writing, acting, whatever. William White lived right around the corner just off Cooper Square, in a basement apartment on East 4th Street, with his wife, Dorothy. He’d just come up from Howard University, where he went despite my telling him all those months in Puerto Rico not to. He was trying to make it painting in the big city. White had several friends whose main focus was scag, and that’s what they contributed to the circle.

The black painter Bob Thompson and I had gotten tight a year or so before. I’d seen him in the Cedar and at some parties. A big, husky, homely dude with hair standing up all over his head. I was always in and out of his loft. (The poet Quincy Troupe reminds me of Bob sometimes.)

A. B. Spellman was still around, now married to a French woman and living not far away down near Houston Street. C.D. was also around. And the painter Joe Overstreet, with his loud-ass self, was there.

Some of the people from the West 20th Street group were still coming by. Joel Oppenheimer and Gil Sorrentino perhaps more than anyone else, and “Cubby” Selby (he’d be looking for shit as well). But there was a distinct change in this circle, one I understood much later. Marion might come around in the morning and we’d bullshit and get high on whatever. We’d go around to bug White or maybe Marion’d come with White and we’d get high and listen to music and bullshit. Archie or Joe might be on the scene. Sonny Murray, the great drummer, lived not too far from us and he’d like as not come in with Marion or, later, by himself. He had just begun to work with the jazz innovator Cecil Taylor. Cecil wanted to rehearse in his loft most of the days. But that was part of it — the time necessary to be put in, to reach the level we all wanted, those of us who were really serious! You got to put in that time, as Max Roach would say.

Sonny was always looking for smoke or whatever and some conversation. He was always full of his chuckling humor and talking about the music. We would sit around and get blind or blind-blind, talking about whatever came into our heads. Whenever someone would show, we had no bell, they had to stand downstairs and holler up; it would be the end of my work day and bullshitting and getting high was the order of the day!

But these were mostly black men that I began to see in the daytime hanging out, where before at West 20th Street, any daytime hanging out was with the Black Mountain crowd and mostly on the weekends because I had the technical editor gig. I was not doing any day gig now, I was writing, actually pretty prolifically. But my daytime hang buddies were black.

White, Bob Thompson, and I (mainly at Bob’s urging) were always putting in “bag time” walking around looking for dope. We might go wandering up Eighth Avenue in Harlem, in and out of some greasy joints, chasing the bag. We were all “chippying,” using scag from time to time, but mainly anytime we could get it. I mostly snorted it, but I was shooting it, too. Bob and White were shooting much more than I was. But all of us up in that group snorted scag like we’d drunk booze at West 20th Street. Plus my old friend Tom Perry would come by and we’d really get it on. (Steve Korret had left the States in 1960, as a new decade came in, connected up perhaps to a previous generation that saw Europe as center. At one point, he’d stopped Joel Oppenheimer and me in the Five Spot and jokingly made reference to a Blues poem of Joel’s in the magazine. Korret was very ironic and curt with Joel but in his humorous albeit quasi-nasty way. He said something to the effect that he wanted to check Joel’s blues, which was also the name of the poem, to see if it was authentic. I’m going to study this aesthetic you’ve roped this boy in with, is what he was implying. Later, on West 20th Street, we’d had an argument. He’d said, “Why are you talking to me in this way?” He was telling me about something he’d been doing at the UN. He’d left the bookstore and gone to the UN to work, divorced Charlene, and he was living with another woman who worked at the UN. In a month he was gone, to Scandinavia, where he lived until 1992, when he died.)

I still went to the Cedar and bellied up to the bar with Basil King or Joel or Gil or A.B. or even Bob and White would come along, but now I was much more into the jazz clubs that were opening and some coffeehouses and lofts that were playing the “new thing” rather than the old stiff formal expensive nightclubs. The Five Spot was the center for us. When Thelonious Monk came in for his historic eighteen-week stay, with John Coltrane, I was there almost every night. I was there from the beginning listening to Trane try to get around on Monk’s weird charts, and gradually Trane got hold to those “heads” and began to get inside Monk’s music. Trane had just come from playing with the classic Miles Davis group that featured Cannonball, Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers, and Red Garland. The Club Bohemia was where I’d heard them “max out” and make their greatest music. And that was a slick nightclub, albeit in the Village. But the Five Spot was on the East Side, on the Bowery. C.T., Cecil Taylor, had really inaugurated the playing of the Music in the place. Before that it had been one of those typical grim Bowery bars, but some of the painters who had lofts on the Bowery and in the area began to come in and drink and they used to ask Joe and Iggy to bring in some music. So the completely unorthodox Cecil was one of the first to come in. By the time Monk and Trane got there, the Five Spot was the center of the jazz world!

In one sense our showing up on Cooper Square was right in tune with the whole movement of people east, away from the West Village with its high rents and older bohemians. Cooper Square was sort of the borderline; when you crossed it, you were really on the Lower East Side, no shit. The Music itself, rapid motion during this period. Trane’s leaving Miles and his graduate classes with T. Sphere Monk put him into a music so expressive and thrilling people all over tuned in to him. Miles’ group was classic because it summed up what went before it as well as indicated what was to come. Miles’ “perfection” was the interrelationship between the hard bop and the cool and in Miles, sassy and sly. So that on the one side the quiet little gurgles that we get as fusion also come out of Miles (all the leading fusionaires from “Cannonball” on are Miles’ alumni) as well as the new blast of life that Coltrane carried, thus giving us the Pharaoh Sanderses and Albert Aylers and the reaching searching cry for freedom and life that not only took the music in a certain direction, but that direction was a reflection of where people themselves, particularly the African American people, were going. It is no coincidence that people always assciate John Coltrane and Malcolm X, they are harbingers and reflectors of the same life development.

And so I, we, followed Trane. We watched him even as he stood staring from the Club Bohemia listening to Miles and going through some personal hells. We heard him blow then, long and strong, trying to find something, as Miles stood at the back of the stage and tugged at his ear, trying to figure out what the fuck Trane was doing. We could feel what he was doing. Amus Mor, the poet, in his long poem on Trane says Miles was cool, in the slick cocktail party of life, but Trane would come in “wrong,” snatchin’ the sammiches off the plate.

The Five Spot gig with Monk was Trane coming into his own. After Monk, he’d play sometimes chorus after chorus, taking the music apart before our ears, splintering the chords and sounding each note, resounding it, playing it backwards and upside down, trying to get to something else. And we heard our own search and travails, our own reaching for new definition. Trane was our flag.

Trane was leaping away from “the given,” and the troops of the mainstream were both shocked and sometimes scandalized, but Trane, because he had come up through the ranks, had paid all the dues, from slicksteppin’ on the bars of South Philly, honking rhythm and blues, through big Maybelle and Diz on up to Miles and then Monk, could not be waved aside by anybody. Though some tried and for this they were confirming their ignorance.

But there were some other, younger, forces coming in at the time and this added still other elements to the music and spoke of still other elements that existed among the African American people. Ornette Coleman had come in, countrified, yet newer than new. He showed at the Five Spot, first, with a yellow plastic alto saxophone, with his band dressed in red Eisenhower jackets, talking about “Free.” It was “a beboppier bebop,” an atomic age bebop, but cut loose from the prison house of regular chord changes. Rhythmically fresh, going past the church revivals and heavy African rhythm restoration that Sonny Rollins, Max Roach and the Messengers, Horace Silver had come out with attempting to get us past the deadly cool of ’50s “West Coast” jazz. Ornette went back to bop for his roots, his hip jagged rhythms, and said, “Hey, forget the popular song, let’s go for ourselves.” And you talking about being scandalized, some folks got downright violent. Cecil Taylor was on the scene first and his aerodynamic, million-fingered pianistics, which seemed connected to the European concert hall, made people gloss over the heavy line of blue syncopation that Cecil came with, and the percussiveness of his piano was as traditional for black “ticklers” as you could get. But that was new too and sassy, even arrogant (like Cecil himself), as if he had gone to the academy (he had) copped what they had, and still brought it back home.

Plus, all of Ornette’s band could play, they’d start and stop like it was in medias res, it seemed there was no beginning or formal ending, yet they were always “together” — Don Cherry, like a brass pointillist, with his funny little pocket trumpets; Charlie Haden, the white bass player who got down on his instrument, strumming and picking it like a guitar, showing that he had heard Monk’s great bassist, Wilbur Ware, and knew which way that ax was going, but at the same time original and singing. And Billy Higgins, of the perpetual smile, cooking like you spose to, carrying the finally funky business forward. They all could play, and the cry of “Freedom” was not only musical but reflected what was going on in the marches and confrontations, on the streets and in the restaurants and department stores of the South.

The ’60s had opened with the black movement stepping past the earlier civil rights phase in many ways. One key addition and change was that now the black students had come into the movement wholesale. So that from 1954 (when Brown v. Board of Ed. showed that the people had forced an “all deliberate speed” out of the rulers instead of the traditional “separate but equal”), through 1960, Martin Luther King and SCLC, mostly black, southern, big-city ministers, leading that struggle for democracy, were at center stage. But in 1960, the student sit-ins began, and, on February 1, black students at Greensboro began a movement that brought literally hundreds of thousands of black students, and soon students of all nationalities, into the struggle for democracy as well. So that soon we would hear the term SNCC, who, at first, were still hooked up with the middleclass ministers and their line of nonviolence, but that would change. But now, the cries of “Freedom” had been augmented with “Freedom Now!”

So it was in the air, it was in the minds of the people, masses of people going up against the apartheid South. It was also coming out of people’s horns, laid out in their music. People like Max Roach spoke eloquently for an older, hip generation. He said “Freedom Now,” and Sonny Rollins had his “Freedom Suite.” And nutty Charlie Mingus was hollering his hilarious “Fables of Faubus.” I even got into a hassle with a bald-headed German clerk in a record store on 8th Street. I’d come in and asked for Jackie McLean’s terrible side “Let Freedom Ring,” and the clerk wanted to give me a lecture about how “you people shouldn’t confuse your sociology with music.” (It was mostly a European concert music-selling store). I told him to kiss my ass, right now. Yeh, kiss my ass … that was also getting into it.

So there was a newness and a defiance, a demand for freedom, politically and creatively, it was all connected. I wrote an article that year, “The Jazz Avant-Garde,” mentioning people like Cecil, Ornette, and the others, plus Trane and the young wizard Eric Dolphy, the brilliant arranger and reed player, Oliver Nelson, Earl Griffith, onetime Cecil Taylor vibist, and my neighbor Archie Shepp, who had come on the scene, also shaking it up.

I also wrote a piece for Kulchur called “Milneburg Joys, or Against Hipness as Such,” taking on members of our various circles, the hippies (old usage) of the period who thought merely by initialing ideas which had currency in the circles, talking the prevailing talk, or walking the prevailing walk, that that was all there was to it. I was also reaching and searching, life had to be more than a mere camaraderie of smugness and elitist hedonism.

Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz,” the completely “free” improvisational record, with the cream of the new players, had set the tone. It was as if the music was leading us. And older players like Trane and Rollins took up that challenge. Trane played chordal music, but he got frantically chordal. The critics called it “sheets of sound,” many at a loss for words, like they’d been when Bird had first appeared. Downbeat and Metronome had to re-review all those old records, because they had put them all down as fakery and they were classics of African American music, so they tried to clean up.

What was being generated by the new blacker circle I mostly hung with was quite different in effect than the earlier circles. Our overall large circle was, of course, well integrated. But now, I’d be sitting and talking to Marion or White or both, or three, add Bob Thompson. Or we’d be at Bob’s loft, checking his wild paintings, all kinds of different-colored women with scenes taken from the Italian renaissance classic painters and reinterpreted through Bob’s way-out mind. White was painting wry symbolic abstractions, where instead of the pure motion-paint of the “action paintings,” White relied on more or less “organic”-looking shapes swirling and dancing on his canvases. I still wonder what White’s work would have been like today had he lived. Or Bob’s, had he lived. Overstreet, at the time, was doing brilliant but highly sexy drawings. And usually we’d be getting high, about to get high, or talking about getting high.

We had some bigger, wilder parties at Cooper Square, in Archie’s loft, with some of the hippest music of the time. And Archie and I used to do some mean tipping around those streets, or when he played we’d go cheer him on. Sometimes with Bob and White and Marion and me, Tom might be walking with us, or hanging with us, and sometimes Elvin Jones or Hank Mobley. Dudes be sitting around heads about to wear they chest out and Elvin would look like he wasn’t even high, smiling his lit-up smile like a neon sign. But Hank eventually got into bad times.

One time I was sitting with Marion and White and somebody else up in my study at Cooper Square and we were shooting cocaine. Somebody also had given us a vial of liquid procaine, which was like fake cocaine. I get the bright idea to melt the real cocaine in the liquid procaine and shoot it up. I had got the needle out of my arm and I feel the rise coming but this time it’s sweeping up through my body to my head like it won’t stop. I was sitting in the big overstuffed desk chair for my rolltop and this hot surge seems to sweep up past my eyes shooting out the top of my skull. I rose up, almost paralleling, I guess, the rise of the drug. I said, “Whooo-ooo,” and then wheeled around in the middle of the room and fell over backwards like I’d been shot. And then, on the floor, semiconscious, it seems to me like some big blue thing is trying to hit me between the eyes. They say I was thrashing around on the floor, turning my head frantically from one side to the other. I thought I was trying to keep the blue thing from hitting me between the eyes. I didn’t know nobody could OD off “coke,” but that felt mighty close to something bad, and it scared the shit out of me. But it didn’t stop me or our drug activities.

We were in the old Half Note on Hudson Street watching Trane slay all pests. Between sets, Bob (who was a great friend of Elvin’s), White and I go up the street, fetch a bag of whatnot, then Bob wants us to stop by this painter’s house he knew, a pretty hip white dude who lived down there. We all high, but Bob wants to go up and talk to the dude. His wife comes to the door in her gown and lets us in. It was a very sheer gown and you could just about see through it. there’s some music playing so after Elvin is introduced, he starts dancing with this dude’s wife, grinding like he’s trying to start a fire. I’d always thought the shit made you unsexual, but it didn’t affect Elvin that way at all. We’d be nodding and he’d go back and play the drums like mad.

There were now a few lofts scattered around where you could hear the music as well as European avant-garde music. I especially liked Morton Feldman’s music, Cage’s audacity and some of the other things. But we were mostly into the new black music. Coffee shops like Take 2, the White Whale, also had the young musicians in when they couldn’t work in the larger clubs. In one of those coffee shops one night a really wild episode went down. It told me something about downtown and myself and some of my friends. Archie Shepp had been playing in this place on 10th Street, the White Whale, the decor even had a big anchor on the wall with huge chains hanging down. It was early and people were sitting around talking and, at a couple of tables, playing chess. There’s one guy sitting there, they called him Big Brown. He was big, about six feet three inches, and much darker than brown. He was slender like he was in shape. Plus, he had this slow, bent-knee hop he walked with that was more peculiar than hip. Brown made his mark downtown by first standing around various places like Washington Square Village profiling. He had muscles, so he liked to preen and twist, stand like a body builder in a show. He was a proto Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Brown’s whole demeanor used to turn me off. But even worse was the fact that not only would he always be in his exaggerated strut, but during the summer months he’d walk the streets in a loincloth, like an Indian fakir or something. And sometimes he’d come into the Cedar when we’d be sitting there and he would come walking down the aisle rubbing his crotch, like he was showing off his wares to the various females. One night he even came up to a booth where one couple was sitting and stood rubbing his crotch just a few inches from this woman’s face! Her companion said something and Brown talked in rhymes putting the dude down. Brown loved to recite singsong versions of Shakespeare or the Rubaiyat or his own rhyming doggerel. A couple of times, I saw him get in some woman’s face who was sitting with some man and I vowed inside my head that that motherfucker better not ever do that to any woman I was with. In fact, when he’d walk down the aisle I’d loudly ridicule him, and one time he cut his eyes over my way, scowled, made some remark, and kept swaggering on up.

But as he was playing chess, the dude he was playing checkmated him, calling “Check!” I laughed, as it happened just as I was passing close to the table where he was sitting.

I said, “Wrong again!” and broke up. Some of my friends, notably A.B., Marion, and Joe, were in there and this cracked them up and some others nearby. Brown always pulled his shit off in the spirit and demeanor of “Bogarting” people. He would run his silent or rhymed gorilla act on people and they were supposed to be intimidated. But I didn’t dig him.

So Brown says something, maybe “Fuck you” or “What you got to do with it?” or something, but the catalyst was me saying, “Big Brown, the African Queen!” So he leaps to his feet and goes into his menace/gorilla stance. But I kept talking, kept putting him down. Not only “African Queen” but all kinds of other things my instinctive sense of danger now has blanked out. Not only that, I start taunting him: “You supposed to be bad. You ain’t bad, dressed up like some fuckin’ genie or something. You just silly. A silly-ass nigger! Shit, I bet you can’t even fight.” Yeh, it really got out. And I can see with some kind of split vision my various buddies flung about the room, frozen stiff as respective Statues of Liberty or Colossi of Rhodes or whatever. (A.B. told me later he kept thinking, “Shut up, little nigger, shut up.”)

I can’t even say what made me go so far. Except I felt Brown’s whole thing was an act, some second-rate vaudeville. Actually, he looked like the dude who used to run with Mandrake, because he wore a turban sometimes. But in some fit of absolute frustration, most likely, Brown reaches and grabs the chains from the wall decor and holds them like he’s going to bash my head in. So I started laughing and taunting him even more. “Yow, a six-foot-three two-hundred-pound bad dude got to get a chain to bash me!” I cracked up. “Hey, man, you must be pretty bad, you gotta get a chain. God damn!” And that broke it open. It was absurd. And in the end, the room was bathed in laughter and Brown stood there with the chain in his hand, then slowly let it fall to the floor. He turned and grimly stalked into the night. My nerves shot more laughter up and out after him, then we got some wine, threw it down telling various bullshit versions of the same event, and trailed out of the joint, with people still pointing and cackling. We looked both ways when we got outside though we still were animated by a frivolity that both masked and carried our deep sighs of relief.

Hey, it wasn’t even the real world. I guess that was my reasoning. In the real world, of Newark’s steel-gray streets, all that mouth would’ve got me killed or at least forced me to set a new indoor and outdoor Olympic hat-up record. But down there, wow, even the bad dudes was cardboard Lothars afraid of their own shadow.

The work with On Guard on Rob Williams’ defense and the Fair Play Committee had given me another and, I think, deeper perspective. I could reflect on revolution and struggle as concrete phenomena. It made the posturing and fakery of much of the downtown residents even more absurd. Though I was still involved in quite a bit of it myself. Lucia DiBella had gotten pregnant. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t mine. And Lucia had one dancer friend of ours living with her from time to time. I thought maybe it was his. But he was a homosexual, a beautiful but tragic dancer who was always slightly fantasizing about himself as a young Nijinsky. One night at a cocktail party, probably high on acid, he stepped through the open window, claiming he could fly, and killed himself. Plus one of the dancer’s men friends, piqued by something he, Neddie, had done, or both of them mutually pissed off at each other, had ended their relationship and the friend, a tall blonde fashion model, Chris Bartlett, and Lucia were rapidly becoming fast friends. However, such “might be’s” and “maybe’s” didn’t change the reality. No matter how many of the endless one-night stands I might get involved with, I’d always show up at Lucia’s.

Actually, the magazine I ran with Nellie, Zazen, had continued to issue No. 8, coming out the same time as The Fleeting Bear, the sheet that Lucia and I put out. Lucia’s pregnancy alerted Nellie, however, and she asked me what I knew about it. I didn’t know anything about that, just because I went over there to put out the Bear didn’t mean anything. But it did. I had asked the poet Harry Schulman, who was a friend of Lucia’s, over the phone, “What does the baby look like?” And he said, “White.” I felt relieved. But in a few days, Nellie came home with our babies from hanging out in Tompkins Square Park near Avenue A where the Lower East Side mothers congregated, as the West Side mothers did in Washington Square Park. She said to me only that she had seen Lucia’s baby and it was “one of those black-and-white kind.” Then she cried some, asking me from time to time, “How could you?” And that was a very good question. I wondered myself.

To make bad things worse, in a few months the house next to ours was vacant and Lucia moved there, baby, model friend, and all. I had said before, it was like Brook Farm. Eventually, the model assumed fathership of the baby, and Lucia and he even had a baby of their own. Lucia called the child she’d had by me Dominique, in honor of the Frenchified LeRoi.

I was now taking published potshots at the nonviolence movement. “Tokenism: 300 Years for Five Cents” was one article, “What Does Non-violence Mean?” another. Kulchur had published the first, and the conservative Jewish publication Midstream the other. I was becoming much more openly involved with movement questions. The mood downtown was changing, there were many more signs of some people getting involved with various struggles, especiallly the Cuban struggle and the student struggle. Plus, there were now a great many more blacks downtown than when I had first arrived half a decade before. I had been on the scene now from the period when there were relatively few blacks and when the sets had gotten fiercely integrated, but now there seemed to be further change. More and more I found myself sitting and talking or walking and making parties with black dudes. We began to feel a certain kind of community, perhaps a kind of solidarity as blacks that was unspoken in the old MacDougal Street days, but was now an openly acknowledged emotional binder. And the various sets we’d go to would always take on a distinctly different tone once we’d enter. Especially with Bob Thompson laughing at the top of his voice and “snatching bitches,” as the saying goes. And White and Marion and I would be blind as the night.

But we knew what was in our hearts, something open and bright. We wanted what was new and hip, though we were connected in a lot of ways with some stuff that was old and square. We knew the music was hip and new and out beyond anything anyone downtown was doing, in music, painting, poetry, dance, or whatever the fuck. And we felt, I know I did, that we were linked to that music that Trane and Ornette and C.T., Shepp and Dolphy and the others, were making, so the old white arrogance and elitism of Europe as Center Art was stupid on its face. We could saunter into a joint and be openly critical of whatever kind of show or program or party, because we knew, number one, it wasn’t as hip as the music, and, number two, it wasn’t as out as we were out, because now we began to realize or rationalize that we were on the fringe of the fringe. If the down-town Village/East Village society was a fringe of big-time America, then we were a fringe of that fringe, which put us way out indeed.

Patrice Lumumba was assassinated by the CIA in 1961 to stop the newly freed Congolese people from nationalizing Union Minière and other Rockefeller properties. I found myself marching outside the UN in demonstrations, while others, mostly blacks, took off their shoes and threw them down in the gallery as the gallery guards were called in to toss the demonstrating blacks out. Sisters were bashing the guards in the head with their shoes and throwing the shoes down out the gallery. Ralph Bunche said he was ashamed and scandalized by such niggerism, while we were scandalized and ashamed of his negro-ass tom antics.

Outside, in front of the U.S. mission to the UN, the police also attacked us. One sister, Mae Mallory, Calvin Hicks, and I were marching and we looked up at the top of the stairs just in time to see James Lawson, the so-called nationalist, pointing us out to the police, and then they attacked us, clubs flying. Mae put up a terrific battle and the police were sorry they ever put their hands on her. It took several of them to subdue her. She was one of the people in On Guard and she remained very active in the Black Liberation Movement.

As the police put us into the paddy wagon, a couple of them would catch us by the elbows and hoist us through the back door, banging the top of our heads on the metal doorframe at the same time. You felt like you’d been whacked yet another time with a nightstick. Dazed in the back of the paddy wagon, I reached into my pockets and found some Benzedrine or Dexedrine pills that I took every once in a while to stay awake if I was writing all night. I threw them all in my mouth, figuring the nabs would charge me with possession of drugs. But I had taken so many I was jittery as a flea. The police must’ve thought it was nerves.

I began to meet some young black intellectuals connected with the Black Liberation Movement and strike up friendships. One I met in this way was Askia Touré (then Rolland Snellings), the poet. We were on those picket lines and I didn’t even know he was a writer. We became friends as part of the movement.

Sometime later I began to get some word of Umbra, a magazine that began to come out from the Lower East Side that featured black writers. Lorenzo Thomas, who published as a very young person in some of the places that the New York school writers published, I think I was aware of first. His work appeared about the same time that Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard, the Oklahoma free association semi-surrealists began to appear. I was especially impressed by Thomas and Berrigan, and very curious about Thomas because he was black.

One later afternoon, as was my wont, I wandered into the Five Spot, the one on the corner of St. Marks and Third Avenue. I’m sitting there sipping and probably glancing at a paper or something when two bloods come up to me. Blues People had come out recently and I was elated and surprised in a way because it was my first book from a mainstream publishing house and I was impressed because of the hardcover. The publisher had even had a party for me at the New School, where I was teaching a course in poetry. Ornette Coleman came, and there is a photograph with the two of us grinning. My mother and father came as well, but one of the biggest disappointments was that my grandmother had died before I had a chance to show that book to her. She probably would’ve cried and told me, “Practice makes perfect.”

But one guy says to me, “You LeRoi Jones?” I probably just nodded or grunted. One of these dudes is sort of big-headed and bulky, the other taller, with midnight-dark glasses and a rough complexion of skin stretched tight in what I’d have to call an ambiguous smile. The big-headed one says, “I like your prose. I don’t like your poetry.” The other guy just continues smiling like he knows a secret.

“Oh?” I left it pointed up like someone had let a pigeon shit on my shoe, but said no more. But the big-headed one wanted to go on and he did, saying some other things. But then he introduced himself and his companion.

“My name is Ishmael Reed. This is Calvin Hernton.” And so I’d met Ishmael Reed and Calvin Hernton, but I didn’t know them from Adam’s house cat. Though it did seem that Hernton’s name rang some kind of bell, someone had mentioned it or I had seen it. But the introduction seemed to me like some challenge, I didn’t know, casual or not. But I took it as such, the way you had to deal with these various ersatz artsy gunfighters roaming around the Village who thought that confrontation in the name of art was the highest form of hanging out.

But I didn’t take the bait. After that intro, I kept sipping my drink. And in a few minutes, Sonny Murray or Marion or White or somebody came in and we got into our serious drinking in peace, probably conjuring up our next bag chase. Reed and Hernton sat awhile and then eased into the early evening. I remember questioning my buddies about them and was told something about Umbra, the folks in it and what it was about. It sounded interesting but I still didn’t know why Reed had wanted to come on like Skippy Homeier looking for Gregory Peck.

We used to hang in the Five Spot in the late afternoon/early evening too, drinking and bullshitting. There’d be a mixture of the artists in the area — musicians, writers, painters. It was a good easterly drinking spot in the daytime. One time Sonny Murray came in and told me he had got into a hassle with Charlie Mingus and had to break a chair over Mingus’ back. Charlie was always in the habit of cursing musicians who were his side men right up on the stage, in front of the public. It was really humiliating. I heard him one night cuss out Lonnie Hillyer, Charlie McPherson, and Jaki Byard, using all kinds of wild language. I wondered how they had gone for that.

A few evenings later, after Sonny related his confrontation with Mingus, allegedly about Mingus calling Sonny “jive” for his free style of drumming, I meet Mingus outside of The Five Spot. I say something to Mingus, like “What’s happening?” or whatever, just a typical greeting. Mingus starts talking some off-the-wall stuff, most of which I didn’t even get with. But then he pushes me, and I’m laughing like it was a joke, which I figured it ought to be. But then he advances, as rapidly as he can with all that weight — Charlie was about a hundred pounds overweight — and he slapped me! It was light, partially because he was off balance and partially because as I saw it coming I tried to pull my head back.

I said, “Hey, man, what’s going on? What’s happening?”

And Mingus starts this spew of profanity, saying something like “You goddam punk,” and I could hear that it had something to do with something I’d written, that I was sympathetic with the avant-garde musicians, or something like that. But this time when he came forward, I went into my Newark Sugar Ray stick and run, jab and duck, and started popping him side his fat head. After a round-and-round of a few minutes Mingus stops and people all around us are telling us we oughta stop and stop acting crazy. I didn’t think I was acting crazy, I was defending myself as best I could against some two- or three-hundred-pound nut.

Mingus stops, then he puts out his hand to shake. He says, “I’m sorry. I made a mistake. I was wrong.” I guess he meant because he thought he could just slap me and walk away, having chastised some jive intellectual. But I’d ducked and dodged around some much-meaner-with-they-hands mf’s than Charlie Mingus. Like I said, in many ways, the downtown scene was completely cardboard.

People like Pharaoh Sanders also began to show up on the scene. When he first arrived, everybody called him “Little Rock” cause that’s where he was from. Pharaoh had the wildest walk, like he was stepping over them rows in the fields. It actually made you break up to watch him bobbing up and down as he walked toward you, horn in hand. But from the first time I heard him play, it was obvious that he was something very much else.

The power and beauty of that music was something again. And now there was so much of it coming out and everybody was talking about Freedom.

I had also got an offer from the Communist Party to edit their literary magazine. I had got some modest name, I guess, as a black intellectual, with an obvious left bent. One day I get a message from a photographer I knew who tells me that someone will be calling me from the magazine. I go over to the building the CP had the magazine’s offices in. The building is dusty, the office is dusty. The whole impact on me was of dust and oldness. I thought maybe these people had been sitting there with cobwebs twisted around their heads since the ’30s. But what was wild is that this guy makes me an offer to become editor of their literary magazine. I wasn’t in the CP, I knew very little about them, except the clichés that we tossed around about the “failure of the ’30s,” not even really knowing what that meant. Though the CP, since its 1957 Congress, had become even formally revisionist, saying that socialism could be brought in the U.S. through elections. I guess they were offering me this job to bring in some new blood, but the whole operation looked too dead to me. I was really flattered, but refused. Later, they started a “black magazine” called Dialog and made the photographer the editor.

I’d also started contributing articles, mostly on music, to a magazine called African Revolution, corning out of Algeria. The progressive Ben Bella government was putting the magazine out and it featured writings from people all over the world. Richard Gibson later became associated with that magazine when he had to leave the U.S. when the government tried to frame him by implicating Fair Play for Cuba in the Kennedy assassination. But before that, Fair Play had been having harder and harder times, based on the fact that as U.S. policy toward Cuba stiffened, many of the liberal types that had supported Fair Play cut out. Also, there was a great deal of internal struggle caused by the SWP and the CPUSA slugging it out in their sectarian battles within the organization and creating chaos and havoc.

But a year or so after Gibson got over to Algeria, the Boumedienne coup came and the left-leaning Ben Bella was overthrown and Gibson and his staff had to run for their lives, barely getting out of Algeria with their skins.

It was a bizarre time, in so many ways. Attempts at new ways of life were clashing with the old. India and China had gotten their formal independence before the coming of the ’50s, and by the time the ’50s had ended, there were many independent African nations (though with varying degrees of neocolonialism). Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah had hoisted the black star over the statehouse in Accra, and Nkrumah’s pronouncements and word of his deeds were glowing encouragement to colored people all over the world. When the Chinese exploded their first A-bomb I wrote a poem saying, in effect, that time for the colored peoples had rebegun. Frantz Fanon’s books were popular, Grove Press had brought out The Wretched of the Earth. My own reading was broad and wilder than I knew. I was reading people like the right-wing Sorel’s Reflections on Violenceas well as the Italian Marxist Gramsci. But it was all mixed up and unsorted. However, I was plodding “forward” at the quickstep.

New ideas were clashing with old ones too. For one thing, with all of our attempted forward thrust, we were still chippying, and for some it was even more serious. White was now bordering on being strung out. He seemed at times to come back, but then for long stretches every time you saw him he’d be nodding. One night a group of sick white boys bashed me in the head on St. Marks Place and left me on my back wondering what hit me. I’d run up and down the streets trying to locate them and when I saw them eating in a Second Avenue Romanian restaurant, I’d gone into a phone booth across the street and called White trying to get some help. There were four or five of them. When I got him on the phone he sounded wasted. A few minutes later he responded and came walking around the corner. I could see him from where I was, hanging, high as planets. I told him to go home, shit, it was better just to be out there by myself. White would get killed trying to pug blind as he was.

The white boys spotted me. When I wheeled around from dealing with White they were not in the restaurant, but as I was walking toward the corner they suddenly leaped out from behind a car on a side street just off Second Avenue. I whipped out me trusty blade as the four of them spread out, one of them with an old burned Christmas tree. But the myth(?) of the crazed Nigra with a knife worked. I screamed that one of them would have to die and they couldn’t decide which, so they threw the tree, which cut my hand pretty badly somehow, but split, up the street and back to their caves.

Bob Thompson had also gotten much the worse for wear, from his constant use of scag. Whereas some of us were merely chippying, Bob and White had been serious. Perhaps because the frustration in the painting world was more intense. Though Bob was beginning to get some recognition and shows. He had even finally gotten hooked up with the Martha Jackson Gallery, which was one of the more prestigious of the galleries dealing with the downtown folk.

Bob had married one of the white bohemian women and her sister was also hooked up with a black dude I knew. Bob’s sister-in-law went with a dude from the South who had been one of White’s best friends, and both this dude, Earl, and Bob were hooked on shit! Earl’s nodding was notorious around us; a once handsome dude, he’d gotten progressively more like Dr. Hyde with each bag he shot up. It got so bad with Bob that he could no longer shoot shit into the veins of his arms, but now stuck needles in his legs and hands, even the tips of his fingers, looking for uncollapsed veins. He started wearing woolen gloves, even in the summer, to hide his ubiquitously punctured hands. One of the musicians we hung around with had developed a huge black knot of a vein on one of his arms, where he shot up all the time, and it seemed all he had to do was jam the spike anywhere in that huge black knot and blood would creep up in the dropper indicating he’d hit. This brother was and is a famous musician, but the last time I saw him, he was so blasted and pitiful he couldn’t even recognize me.

A major point of change for us came with John Kennedy’s assassination. Kennedy, for many of us, even unconsciously, represented something positive. The Kennedys were liberals. (The liberal wing of the bourgeoisie, at least.) JFK’s pronouncements were meant to be progressive-sounding. And his and Jackie’s style, their youth — “They bought paintings from” was one repeated line you could hear at the Cedar. But many of us did have some emotional investment in the so-called Camelot and the New Frontier.

The day Kennedy was assassinated, Bob Thompson and I were walking down Cooper Square and radios and televisions everywhere carried the grim scenes. Bob walked out in the gutter, near my house, and wept openly. That shook me up, because though I was disturbed, curious, about the assassination, I hadn’t realized it until I saw Bob sitting now on the curb, weeping uncontrollably about Kennedy’s death. I wrote a poem which had to be tipped into the winter issue of Kulchur called “Exnaugural Poem,” with a subtitle, “for Jackie Kennedy who has had to eat too much shit.” I was trying to move to a revolutionary position, but I was still ready to weep for Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy!

Malcolm X had begun to reach us. I’d heard of the Nation of Islam and had even heard Malcolm speak on television and he charged me in a way no one else had ever done. He reached me. His media appearances made my head tingle with anticipation and new ideas. He made me feel even more articulate and forceful, myself, just having seen him. But I was not clear about the Nation of Islam and not being in a black community am sure I did not receive the full impact of Elijah Muhammad’s teaching and image, but Malcolm had begun to get some media coverage.

When Malcolm was silenced by the Nation for commenting on Kennedy’s death — that it was “chickens coming home to roost” — I was very deeply puzzled and disturbed because I didn’t understand why Elijah Muhammad would do that. Malcolm was his sword, his chief, the most articulate man in the world, as far as I was concerned. Why had this happened? When he had said that the March on Washington was a black bourgeois status symbol, I’d roared.

Also, I’d read about how Malcolm had led a small army of Black Muslims to a Harlem police station to stand in silent protest against police brutality and how the precinct finally had yielded to Malcolm’s cold dignity. They knew they were not playing with some schizophrenic Negro but a strong black man, a black leader.

To me, the March on Washington, which happened the same year that JFK was assassinated, marks the end of the second phase of the civil rights movement, in which SNCC and the students had come to center stage, even though King was still seen as the maximum leader. Malcolm’s cold class analysis at Selma, talking about the House Slaves and the Field Slaves and how the House Slave identified with his white Master so completely that when the Master got sick, the House Nigger did too, and when the Master’s house caught on fire the House Nigger would scream, “Boss, our house on fire!” But the Field Slave would fan the flames. That bit of class analysis dug into me, cutting both ways.

And then, the little girls in the Birmingham church were murdered by a bomb planted by a white racist and King wanted to kneel in the streets and pray, but Malcolm talked bad about nonviolence, saying that those people who had done such a thing and indeed all the white racist crackers in the world could only be reached if one spoke the same language that they spoke. That language was not peace and love, said Malcolm.

One night I saw Malcolm lay waste completely to Kenneth Clark, Constance Baker Motley, and some other assorted house Negroes, just as he had wasted David Susskind and Mike Wallace. (The Wallace program, “The Hate That Hate Produced,” had shot Malcolm X and the Nation into the public eye.) This kind of thing would thrill me so completely because what Malcolm said were things that had gone through my mind but he was giving voice to. Or he’d say things and instantly it’d make sense or confirm something I’d not even thought but felt.

At one point, Kenneth Clark was saying, “Come, come, Mr. X, I don’t believe Negroes will act the way you say.” Malcolm had told him that blacks would not continue to turn the other cheek, that the young people would not stand still for the kind of white supremacy bullshit, of water hoses, police dogs, homegrown Nazis like George Wallace and Bull Connors. No, black people would not stand for it, especially not the young ones. But Kenneth Clark wanted to go on talking his house-slaveryism. This was early in 1964.

I felt that way. Malcolm X spoke for me and my friends; Kenneth Clark did not. C.D. used to walk around during this period and ask us, “Suppose all the Negroes did leave America to be in their own nation, would you go or stay?” C.D. also had married a white woman, with a charming French accent and a bit of continental spice. That’s the way some of us saw the contradiction. Would you go or stay?

For me, Malcolm’s words had me turning tricks whether I knew it or not. What it meant to my life immediately was words in my head coming out of my mouth. (I thought about Tim Poston, wandering down Third Avenue, completely off his rocker. He was mumbling, “The Jews are talking through my mouth. The Jews are talking through my mouth.” And he tried to clasp his hand across his mouth, spitting these words out as if in terror. The society and the wine had done him in.)

How did we act in the face of the world now, with all its steady wave of new meanings coming in? What did we do? How did we act?

For one thing, unconsciously at first, but then very openly, dramatic dialogue began to appear in my poetry. Suddenly there were people, characters, talking in them. The tiny play The Eighth Ditch, which I put into the Dante book and had gotten me busted, some of the people connected with Lucia asked to produce — probably because they were gay and the play was about a homosexual rape. It opened on St. Marks Place in a place called the Poet’s Theater, but the police closed it after a few performances.

I began to be interested more directly in drama. I’d written a play called The Baptism and one called The Toilet. The Toilet was published in the drama issue of Kulchur. (As editor, one of the plays I had turned down was Douglas Turner Ward’s take-off of Ray Bradbury’s “Way in the Middle of the Air,” in The Martian Chronicles; Ward called it “Day of Absence.”)

I can see now that the dramatic form began to interest me because I wanted to go “beyond” poetry. I wanted some kind of action literature, and the most pretentious of all literary forms is drama, because there one has to imitate life, to put characters upon a stage and pretend to actual life. I read a few years ago in some analysis of poetry that drama is a form that proliferates during periods of social upsurge, for those very same reasons. It is an action form, plus it is a much more popular form than poetry. It reaches more people and its most mass form today is of course television and, secondarily, film.

I got involved with a drama/playwright’s workshop initiated by Edward Albee and his producers at the Cherry Lane Theater, Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder. The workshops were held down at the Vandam Theater, a tiny but attractive theater on Vandam Street, a few blocks below Houston Street. One night I sat up all night and wrote a play I called Dutchman. I had gotten the title from The Flying Dutchman, but abstracted it, because Flying Dutchman had been used and it didn’t quite serve my purposes, whatever they were. It took place in a subway and was essentially a confrontation between a slightly nutty (and wholly dangerous) white female bohemian and a young naive black intellectual. The director, Ed Parone, read it and liked it and so there was talk about doing a workshop performance.

We did the workshop performance and it was very successful. I even got Marion Brown a job as an extra and quite a few people I respected dug the play. So it was decided to do a commercial production. In February 1964, James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie opened on Broadway, directed by Burgess Meredith, and, while it had mixed reviews, it was one of the great theater experiences of my life. A deeply touching “dangerous” play for Jimmy, it not only questioned nonviolence but had a gutsy (but doomed) black hero and his father go at each other’s values, echoing the class struggle that raged between Dr. King and Malcolm X. Al Freeman played Richard, the Malcolm type, though Jimmy couched his rebellion in sexual symbolism (including, as far as I’m concerned, the character’s name). Diana Sands, as Juanita, gave a marvelous performance, showering us with Jimmy’s questioning even of “God in his heaven” for his part in the conspiracy that leaves us powerless and our young men killed. It was an extremely powerful work, so powerful I believe that the bourgeois (mainly white) critics at that point read Jimmy out of the big-time U.S. literary scene. He had gone too far. And as critical as I had been before of Jimmy and what I perceived as his stance of avoiding reality and confrontation, now I was elated and almost raised up off the ground by this powerful play.

Dutchman opened the next month, downtown, at the Cherry Lane, with Robert Hooks and Jennifer West in the leads. I went out late that night after the opening, up to the corner of St. Marks and Second Avenue, and read the reviews. They were mixed too, but there seemed to me a kind of overwhelming sense from them that something explosive had gone down. I had a strange sensation, standing there like that. I could tell from the reviews that now my life would change again. I wasn’t sure how, but I could perceive that and it sent a chill through me. I walked back home slowly, looking at my name in the newspapers, and I felt very weird indeed.

When the magazines and electronic media coverage of the play and local word got out, I could see that not only was the play an artistic success, despite my being called “foul-mouthed,” “full of hatred,” “furious, angry,” I could tell that the play had made its mark, that it would not quietly fade away.

Suddenly I got offers to write for the Herald Tribune and the New York Times. One magazine wanted me to go down South and be a civil rights reporter. I got offers to rewrite Broadway plays in tryout, including Golden Boy, with the producer flying me down from Buffalo, where I’d gone as visiting lecturer in American poetry, to eat breakfast in his well-appointed brownstone on the Upper East Side. There was all kinds of interest and requests and offers and propositions. It was as if the door to the American Dream had just swung open, and despite accounts that I was wild and crazy, I could look directly inside and there were money bags stacked up high as the eye could fly!

It was clear, I could get it. An article came out in the Herald Tribune’s Sunday magazine, “King of the Lower East Side.” The phone leaped with people calling for interviews, my name began to pop up all over the place, coming out of the mouths of people I didn’t even know. It was a swirl of attention, pregnant promise was being popped for my pleasure. Oh? I could feel myself being raised, lifted by some strictly finite presence, but it was like some wind, full of names, some historic presence that I could casually identify as anything. Anything I understood. But that was the ripper, señor, the contradictory motions of my life must make it obvious, how confused I was. I had to read the play Dutchman again, just to understand it. And those words led in all directions, away from the page and into my life and memory. And what was it really saying, after all? I was asked that again and again. A confrontation between two people, between two symbols? I improvised from my deepest feelings. “It is about how difficult it is to become a man in the U.S.” That, I knew, was true and honest. But a naive black youth, a soi-disant intellectual murdered by a mad white woman he had hoped to seduce? Shit, and it was only that crazy Dolly I’d dressed up and set in motion and some symbols from out of my own life.

I was at Barbara Teer’s house when she was married to Godfrey Cambridge. It was Barbara Ann’s party, they were mostly her friends. Godfrey sat in the kitchen fiddling with a camera. Barbara Ann and Bobby Hooks were close. Later, they even started an actors’ group that evolved into the Negro Ensemble Company, somehow without Barbara Ann. There was an actor-model who also wrote plays, and he was alarmed that my play had gotten some attention. All of us know that there is no black person but ourselves that deserves to be that noble savage in the buttermilk, but ourself, dammit, ourself, goddammit, and double, ourself!! So he says to someone else, really as a gibe flying in my direction, “That’s why the guy gets killed, hahahahaha.”

My normal reaction would be to say something really low as to this dude’s gender or sexual orientation or maybe just about the sexual orientation of his father or mother or both. But I just looked in his direction and smiled really as pleasantly as sulphuric acid could. And that was because I could tell, even though I hadn’t heard the entire remark, that there was some element to it that was, indeed, legitimate.

But in the barrage of attention and unbalanced huzzas, I went inside. When I got an assignment to write an article in the Tribune’s magazine section, I took it as the main question being asked and I wanted my main answer. I can see now, it was just my confusion that allowed so much of the Great White Way to flow in my direction. It was the contradictions in my life and thinking, the unresolved zigzags of my being that permitted them to hoist me up the flagpole to wave, for them.

So as I wrote that article, “LeRoi Jones Speaking,” there came over me this most terrific sense of purpose and focus. It rose up within me like my grandfather’s ghost. Yeh, I was some colored bohemian liberal living on the Lower East Side in hedonism heaven, yet I could not sound like that. What “fame” Dutchman brought me and raised up in me was this absolutely authentic and heartfelt desire to speak what should be spoken for all of us. I knew the bullshit of my own life, its twists and flip-outs, yet I felt, now, some heavy responsibility. If these bastards were going to raise me up, for any reason, then they would pay for it! I would pay these motherfuckers back in kind, because even if I wasn’t strong enough to act, I would become strong enough to SPEAK what had to be said, for all of us, for black people, yes, particularly for black people, because they were the root and origin of my conviction, but for anyone anywhere who wanted Justice!

The article was really, then, a commitment to struggle. I said, “Let them know this is a fight without quarter, and I am very fast.” Brash, arrogant, sophomoric, but it was smoke from a moving vehicle! There now began in my downtown environs and elsewhere a dervish of forums, speakouts, intellectual shootouts, not just in reflection of my own mind’s motion but as reflection of what the whole society had become and was still to become.

One forum at Carnegie Hall with Lorraine Hansberry, I remember as the kind of document of this event, which was packed to the rafters, me jumping up and furiously putting down liberals and liberalism with such vehemence that it made not a few people’s teeth rattle. The Village Voice and several of the other liberal journals carried sympathetic disclaimers of the event for the liberals.

There was also another kind of motion downtown. Added to the initial coming together of blacks in the Village there was now a distinctly militant kind of black emerging as well. I began to come in contact more and more with them.

One night at a party at Marzette Watts’ loft, who lived on the first floor of the Cooper Square place, there was some kind of battle, a fight it turned out and finally Sonny Murray had it out with this bone-slim wiry dude with a permanent bitter smirking smile on his face. What wigged me is that this dude, Tong he was called because of his Asian-looking eyes, had popped Sonny in the nose and broke it. I couldn’t conceive of anyone beating Sonny. But then, as it turned out, I didn’t even know this dude. And he is posturing over in the corner talking to a friend of his and his brother and when I come up he says, “Yeh, I did just what I thought I could do, broke this motherfucker’s nose.”

The blood rushed into my head and I got into the dude’s face, “So what you spose to be, bad? You can get killed, too, my man. You know, you can get laid out right here in the street.” It was not even with a desire to fight, or maybe it was, but it was anger and shock at seeing Sonny disabled. Tong said nothing to me, he just put on his coat and hat with the jerky, manic motion I was to become familiar with and with his running buddy, Jimmy Lesser, split. His brother, Shammy (real name Chase Hackensack), didn’t go with his brother Tony (real name Bobby Hackensack). I guess to show there was some distance between him and his brother, he laid. But though I’d seen him before, I didn’t really know him. But now I would.

There was another forum down at the Village Vanguard, probably on a Monday night. It was Archie Shepp, Larry Rivers, somebody else, and myself. We were discussing racial problems in the U.S., and Larry, I guess, because we had been friends and had had a lot of laughs together, did not feel particularly threatened by me or Archie, both of whom he had sopped up much alcohol with. Larry was even an old scag man from way back when he was an uptight young Jew looking to play the alto like Charlie Parker.

But Archie made some distance, and when the question of struggle and change and, yes, revolution came up, Larry backed off. But I cut into him perhaps too cruelly, for that context. I said, “Hey, you’re all over in these galleries, turning out work for these rich faggots, you part of the dying shit just like them!” That shocked a lot of our friends who were there, not so much what was said, I suppose, but the viciousness of it, the absolute distance raised, not only between Larry and ourselves but whole bunches of folks tied to him, who likewise had thought there was some intellectual and emotional connection between us. But now it seemed there was fire in me that could rush up and out even directly into the faces of some of my old friends.

For Nellie, this period was also a contradictory thing. Obviously, the attention and celebrity of Dutchman pleased her. I guess it was, in one very nasty sense, some justification, even legitimization, of our marriage to all her old familial connections. The inner-circle hauteur that only the cognoscenti who read Zazen or Evergreen Review could appreciate had now been replaced by a wider spread of public talk. It was not just some colored guy, she was married to somebody. (Apologies to Jesse Jackson.) The rounds of cocktail parties and receptions we got invited to, the “sudden” literary presence that even her old employers at Sectarian Review must have appreciated, obviously warmed her. In the same year the book Dutchman was published (although with another play she distinctly did not like, The Slave). Dutchman won the Obie Award as Best American Play, and since I was out of town during the awards dinner, she had to accept the award on my behalf. I know these are the kinds of things she had unconsciously prepared for, though in another context, a great part of her life.

The trouble was that now there was some kind of slow drift by me away from her. For the past period the liaisons I had with other women had grown less frequent, but now, from no open or conscious plan I put forward, the women I began to see were black. Though they were hooked up or on the fringes of the same shit. Plump brown Rose and I staggered out of the Five Spot together late one night, down to her place in Brooklyn, which looked like a hurricane had hit it. Or yellow Joanie, trying to make it in advertising, from one of those schools, saying goodbye in the subway station and roaring off rather than be used by some white woman’s man after business hours.

I was invited to a writer’s conference at Asilomar, Monterey, “The Negro in American Literature.” My recent celebrity made me the bull’s-eye of the joint. Not only to be shot at but hit on. I found myself inundated with lovely black women. I mean, just to sit and talk and remember what they were like. What it meant when I put my hand out and they put their hands out to shake, innocently enough, to see how our hands matched so and to hear their voices lilting, full of questions about my work, or Baldwin’s or Wright’s, was kind of thrilling. Not to mention the heavier stuff that went on later in the evening, in this small cabana-like apartment with a glass door opening down to the beach.

The last sister I was with and I roared up the coast in her MG after the conference was over and we stayed at her place in Oakland for a couple of days, walking around Berkeley, going into San Francisco. I even got into a fight with this white writer, later a famous novelist, who was then a lousy poet (I’ve never read his novels). It was really, I think, about the same kind of thing as the Village Vanguard shootout. He wouldn’t fight but the woman he was with, a poet of deservedly small reputation, tried to jump me for roaring at her man. I mean, she wanted to scratch me or jump on me with her hands and I swatted her while the young sister, Gwendolyn Buck, full of southern petty bourgeois gentility, watched in a state of half alarm, half amusement. And we discussed the episode over drinks into the wee hours.

While I was in Oakland, a local dude and his friends heard I was there from this sister, Gwen’s running buddy, who’d been at the conference, and he came over to get his copy of Blues People autographed. He was working as a standup comedian in a local nightclub, his name was Bobby Seale. A couple of years later, he and Huey Newton were to put together the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense!

When I talked to Nellie on the phone, she could only say, “Why are you still there? Come back. You should come back, now.” It was like she could sense something was very much awry. There was a note of desperation in her voice.

At home, a collecting up of this heavier black circle went on, still casually, but fueled by reality. I could sense some distance now between Nellie and me that had never existed before: a darkness into which words disappeared. I saw Shammy again, he began hanging around this little gym where we played basketball, where my kids were in nursery school. He’d be on the sidelines cheering, though I could sense he could play, too. But he could see that I was no stranger to the court, and if I made some hook or jump shot it seemed to connect him to me more closely. I guess he could see I was a real person.

Since our struggle with the SWP in On Guard, a couple of the black SWP cadres had come around and I’d talked to them. The one I got closest to was Cornelius Suares, called Corny. He was a black worker, working almost all his adult life (except for the time he was in jail) in the garment district, pushing, as he called them, “them Jewish airplanes.” He pushed the garment racks up and down the streets. Corny was the loudest person on record, check the Guinness Book of Records. He had a hard and willfully rough exterior but he was a very sweet and gentle dude in many ways. If he felt really put upon or pissed off, he’d break down and cry.

His running buddy, whom I also got to like a lot, was Clarence Franklin, another worker, doing New York City messenger work. He was once SWP’s candidate for mayor and is a sensitive poet, though Clarence talks only as a last resort. Plus, Clarence’s brothers Doll and Robert, who are the talkingest dudes, next to Cornelius, you’re ever likely to meet. All of these brought another air into my life, a wind of further reality, of actual concrete life.

I went to Buffalo for a month that summer, with my family, as a lecturer in poetry, in some program put together to get Charles Olson, Creeley, and some of the other new poets up there lecturing. I still had a great admiration for Olson. I had gone up to his house a couple of times, up in Gloucester. Once in the late fifties with McClure and Wieners, later with Don Allen and Irving Rosenthal who had just quit as editor of the Chicago Review, to write a novel, Sheeper. Olson had taken us one night to this castle in Gloucester that this rich dude had imported stone for stone from Europe. And now it sat in Gloucester, overlooking the bay. The guy’s father had invented the electronically controlled boat. And he used to steer these boats by remote control up and down in that harbor.

We had some interesting evening. Olson, center stage as usual, was telling these stories and the son or grandson of the inventor, who was now master of the house, had a few friends over, all, I think, gay. I think the only non-gay persons in the crib were Olson and I. The castle was full of statues and hanging tapestries. At one point, the owner excused himself and then we heard organ music. We figured it was him, but then he returned and the organ was playing, we were told, by remote control. He then started to make weird effects — slurs, eerie moans, and ghostly sounds — on the thing. Olson and I were catching each other’s eye, but Olson kept talking.

When we go to bed that night, I got a room that’s right off this patio in the middle of the castle. After midnight sometime, I hear this noise like splashing and men’s voices high and tittering. I go to the door and prop it open and this guy’s friends are diving from a second-story balcony down into this pool in the middle of the patio. They’re butt naked. It was like being woven into a tapestry of exotic otherness, but the next day when we get back to Olson’s place he is roaring with laughter at the whole business.

What fascinated me about Olson was his sense of having dropped out of the U.S., the “pejoracracy.” He said in his poems we should “Go Against” it. That we should oppose “those who would advertise you out.” It was a similar spirit that informed the most meaningful of the Beats, and Olson was a heavy scholar. His “Projective Verse” had been a bible for me because it seemed to give voice to feelings I had about poetry and about society. When Charles came down to Cooper Square, there was another sense that what we were doing he could use, that it was something he thought useful and correct, the Zazens and Totem Press and the rest of it. I had even seen remarks he made at Berkeley letting me know that he thought Dutchman was an estimable work. It was Olson, because of his intellectual example, and Ginsberg, because of his artistic model and graciousness as a teacher, whom I thought most about in terms of the road I was moving along. Where would they be in all this? Also, my friend Ed Dorn, the poet, who was living out in Pocatello, Idaho, in a place so American it didn’t understand itself. How would he relate? We wrote many letters back and forth. And the book The Dead Lecturer, which came out that year (1964), is dedicated to Ed. It included the comic-book hero Green Lantern’s code: “In Blackest Day/In Blackest Night/No Evil Shall Escape My Sight/Let Those Who Worship Evil’s Might/Beware My Power/Green Lantern’s Light!”

Ed and his family and Nellie and I and our children lived together briefly up in Buffalo that summer. It was like the last touching of the old places, though I didn’t know it. I liked Ed so much because he had (and has) an intellectual toughness that perceives the worst in the U.S., but he has the energy needed to survive that worst. His Idaho and New Mexico sojourns, I think, were meant to keep him from the sickness of big-time America. Yet the leaks of that sickness are themselves communities, even on the geographic outskirts of the various big apples and pears and plums of gimmegotcha melican society.

These white men saw that I was moving away from them in so many ways and there was some concern, because it wasn’t that I didn’t like them any longer, it was just a feeling that where I was going they couldn’t come. Where that was, I couldn’t even articulate. Those who were physically close to me, the old New York crowd, I was less concerned about, because we had our day-to-day confrontations. There was no room for decent concern or sentimental concern either, we were too concretely close and for that reason getting away from them was a physical and intellectual syllogism.

While I was in Buffalo, the Harlem Rebellion broke out. There had been a couple rebellions in other cities just before Harlem went up, in Jacksonville and then in a suburb of Chicago. But Harlem had the media coverage. It was like the proof that the ticking inside our heads had a real source and was not subjective. It bore out what Malcolm had said at the beginning of the year. It made Blues for Mr. Charlie and Dutchman seem dangerously prophetic.

I left Buffalo, to get closer to what was happening. The events rang in me like the first shots of a war, which I not only knew would break out but one that I had to get into because I felt I had helped start it. I remember getting a .45 automatic from where I had stashed it. Lana Solon looked surprised, I hadn’t seen her in months. But I had left a piece there back behind some suitcases. She said, “I knew you’d come. I felt it.” I got the piece from where I’d hidden it, put it in my gas mask bag, and split. I never saw her again.

After the Harlem Rebellion it was a rush of events, confrontations, tempers, even histories that I witnessed and was part of. For one thing, the sense of being more and more estranged from Nellie was reaching an openly rising quantitative peak. We were seldom together now, the way we had been. I was hanging out and meeting with mostly young black dudes, both my brothers from the earlier Cooper Square circle and the later crowd of people. Shammy, his brother Tong, who I still did not feel comfortable around; he gave me a cold and clammy feeling. Jimmy Lesser came by now, usually with Shammy. He dressed like a classic Black Muslim and I accepted him as that. One of White’s old junkie friends also began to dress up like a Muslim and he seemed to have cleaned up as well. But that didn’t bother White, Jim; he was still getting higher and higher. Corny, usually with Clarence, would show. Plus, Overstreet might breeze by and we’d drink a bottle of vodka. One time White, Overstreet, and I go to a party around the corner and Overstreet and I get into a fight, or I should say a “fight.” I don’t know what happened and he claim he don’t know either, but when we woke up the bottle of vodka was empty, most of my clothes were ripped off, and Overstreet was laid out drunk. We didn’t know where White had gone.

Marion and Archie were around and Bob when he wasn’t drilled flat by the scag. A young dude named Dave, light-skinned, heavy glasses, interested like all of us in the music and also poetry. Both of the Hackensack Brothers were part of Umbra and I began to get more word on what that was or had been. I found out later that they had had some intense struggle over a poem that was to be published that was critical of JFK. One group wanted to can the poem because Kennedy had got iced, the other, more militant group thought the poem still needed to be printed. And there were all kinds of recriminations. I still saw C.D., but not in the same way as before. He was very much married and the French lady had, it seemed, a rather abbreviated tether.

I’d see Tom Perry, and if Tom and White and I got together with maybe Marion or even Bob when he could see, we still got wasted. And walked around, in and out of parties, being even more removed by the shit, and our sense of removal from that whole scene. But even that enlarged circle had its sectors, and it would, at a later time, split in half as well.

The public verbal shootout that remains most clearly etched in my memory is one that was held at the Village Gate. In this there were questions from the audience and I had now grown into a stance of actually putting down white people. I had long done this in my writing, from a concrete point of origin. These torturous years the African and African American have spent as slaves and chumps for this white supremacist society obviously provided enough factual resources to support a tirade against whites. The Muslim example, particularly and most inspirationally the role of Malcolm X, supported my attack. But still I was married to a white woman; I still had many white friends. I still thought very highly of innumerable white intellectuals and artists. But I felt justified in talking about the horrible bullshit that white people had put on the world, bullshit they are still putting on the world (though now my view is tempered by the science of class analysis — but then so many whites go for the ghost of white racism, and whether they actually benefit from it or not, still do go for it and actively support it — and the poison of white chauvinism warps some of the otherwise hippest white minds in extant).

A woman asked me in all earnestness, couldn’t any whites help? I said, “You can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world’s people with your death.” She seemed flabbergasted. Another mentioned Goodman and Schwerner, they had been slaughtered along with black James Chaney in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by Klansmen in police uniforms. And certainly their sacrifice is to be upheld and the willingness of young whites to put their lives on the line for the struggle for democracy is a noble thing, an important thing, and any people sincerely interested in making revolution must have allies. Only people not really serious about making revolution can dismiss sincere allies. But in my fury, which had no scientific framework, I could only thrash out at any white person. The fact that Chaney was never mentioned, and Goodman and Schwerner were, pissed the hell out of me. I told the woman, “I have my own history of death and submission. We have our own dead to mourn. Those white boys were only seeking to assuage their own leaking consciences.”

And in this last outrageous diatribe I was confusing Schwerner and Goodman with the young white poseur-liberals who sashayed safely through the streets of Greenwich Village, the behind-the-lines bleeding hearts. When, on the real side, if I could have stood some hard truth, Schwerner and Goodman were out there on the front lines doing more than I was! But Chaney had been beaten beyond recognition; he had so received the fury of those maniacs but all these people wanted to talk about was the white youths’ deaths.

I guess, during this period, I got the reputation of being a snarling, white-hating madman. There was some truth to it, because I was struggling to be born, to break out from the shell I could instinctively sense surrounded my own dash for freedom. I guess I was in a frenzy, trying to get my feet solidly on the ground of reality. And during this period, whether publicly or not, there was a lot of snarling, and cussing out of white folks, and punchin’ people in the mouths to justify our growing sense of ourselves.

Albert Ayler had come on the scene around this point. He appeared at my house one afternoon with a dude named Black Norman. I had heard of Albert and think I’d even heard him on some record where he was still playing with a group that was sounding the standard bebop changes, My Name Is Albert Ayler. But Albert had already moved beyond that. Albert had this white shock of beard that shot out of his chin, though he was a little short stocky dude, that made him look extra weird. Plus the intensity in his eyes and voice. Norman was his sidekick mystic, chuckling always about something the rest of us was just a little too square to dig.

Albert had asked me about the music and about my writing on the music. I think he wanted to challenge me because I didn’t really know who he was. He asked me did I think it was about me? He said, “You think it’s about you?” I did and didn’t know what he meant. In some ways, I guess, I did think it was about me. Albert meant it was really about Spirit and Energy. This is what it, life, everything, was really about. Not personalities and their yes-and-nos. Albert was always jumping on folks by saying of corny people, “He thinks it’s about him,” with the “him” said so disdainfully, as only Albert could say it, so you really could dig that was some stupid shit. “It ain’t about you!” Albert would say. “He thinks its about Him! And it ain’t about Him.” And he’d stretch his eyes wide and maybe spit out a jagged hunk of laugh.

Plus, Albert, we found out quickly, could play his ass off. He had a sound, alone, unlike anyone else’s. It tore through you, broad, jagged like something out of nature. Some critics said his sound was “primitive.” Shit, it was before that! It was a big massive sound and wail. The crying, shouting moan of black spirituals and God music. Pharaoh was so beautiful and he had a wildness to him too, a heavy force like the world could be reopened, but Albert was mad. His playing was like some primordial frenzy that the world secretly used for energy. Yeh, the music. Feeling all that, it touching us and us touching it, gave us that strength, that kind of irrevocability we felt. Like the thunder or the lightning or the ocean storming and mounting, crushing whatever was in its path.

At Lincoln Center one night, Trane’s group with Eric Dolphy and Pharaoh too, plus Cecil Taylor, was on the same bill and Art Blakey and the Messengers. It was a beautiful night of music, but the high point was when Albert, whom I had come up to the hall with, came out on the stage, at Trane’s invitation. He came out in the middle of one tune, horn held high up in the air, blowing like the world was on fire. His monster sound cut through all the music, he was blowing so loud, the timbre was so big. People in the audience and the musicians on the stage were electrified. After the performance, backstage, Trane asked Albert, “Hey, man, what kind of reed you using?” I could dig that!

Marion and some other people were playing in D.C. Marion and I were very close in those days, he’d come by and tell me all his plans and projections and co-sign some of mine. Marion sometimes seemed very bohemian and disconnected. He was heavily introspective, I guess like many of us. But he also had a practical, opportunity-seeking side of him. He wanted to meet people and when he finally did decide he wanted to go back to the Music, being in and around Cooper Square got him quickly connected up with Archie Shepp. And just as Shepp’s first major side was “4 for Trane,” so Marion’s first side was “3 for Shepp.” So Marion was quietly but efficiently building his own career while watching close up on mine.

So I wanted to go down to D.C. to hear him play in what amounted to his first big gig with his own group. A group of us were going down, but as we were getting ready a feeling of dread descended on me. Like nothing that I had ever felt before. I found myself dreading taking Nellie down to D.C. with me. I was perspiring and agitated as the time approached. I was pacing around in the house, trying to get high and drunk at the same time, but doing neither. I was cold sober. It was the feeling that Nellie was outside of my concerns, that we did not connect up. I think now I resented her. It was the black-white thing, the agitation, the frenzy, always so deeply felt and outer directed. It had settled in me directed at my wife. I had begun to see her as white! Before, even when I thought she was white, I had never felt anything negative. Even to the point of our beginning debates in the Village and the rising political consciousness I was developing. I had never felt anything abstractly negative about Nellie.

There had even been a magazine satire about me as the great white-hating militant finishing one of my diatribes and then going back to the dutiful white wife. But that had not bothered me, it had not affected my sense of myself or my regard, in whatever way that was carried, for Nellie. But now it was different. There was within that shadow I described before not only a deep vacuum where words could disappear, there was now a coldness, a sharp disaffection that existed.

“Nellie, we can’t go down to D.C. together. I don’t want to go with you.”

She looked puzzled and tensed, somehow expectant. “What do you mean?”

“I’m black, Nellie. I’m black and you’re” I trailed off. “White. I can’t do this, Nellie. I’m black.”

That look in her eye then was of such deep hurt and confused amazement that I almost covered my face so I did not have to look at her face. “Oh, Roi,” she said. “That’s silly. You’re Roi and I’m Nellie. What are you talking about?”

What was the correlative or parallel scene being played all over the world which meant the same thing in all the different sectors and levels of human experience? That open call for that splitting up. As if the tragic world around our “free zone” had finally swept in and frozen us to the spot.

The play The Slave, which shows a black would-be revolutionary who splits from his white wife on the eve of a race war, was what Nellie called “Roi’s nightmare.” It was so close to our real lives, so full of that living image.

We talked awhile, saying really little else. Actually, we repeated the things we had already said, in other ways. But finally, I was gone, down to D.C., where Marion was playing. But when I got down there I had a kind of relapse. I thought I had done wrong to leave Nellie that way, though I was coming back. The serious business of what was to happen to us and with our marriage was still to be done. The set was in a hotel and I paced back and forth and called home, but no one answered. Nellie was wherever she had to go to deal with such conflict. I called again and again, pacing, now feeling somehow I was trapped in this high building, unable to get back and cut off from this woman I had lived with for almost seven years. I was nervous and confused and though there was a party after Marion’s set, I went to my room and laid up brooding about what the fuck I’d said and done. I called again; no answer.

Finally the drink I was nursing ran out, so I went down the hall to where the party was. When I stuck my head in looking around for the alcohol, there was a very slender red-brown black girl with the kind of “Mariney” red-brown haircut, very short and worn natural. She looked at me and smiled and not only did she not avert her eyes in some false modesty, she winked at me mischievously. I stood my ground, still looking for the big drink. But smiling, trying to be cheerful. So she comes over, drink in hand. She says, “You look hip, what’s your name?” Her name was Vashti.

We breezed out of that joint in a few, and wound up in my room, talking eight thousand miles an hour about everything we could think of. She was a young woman, still college age, but she had dropped out, she said, cause she wanted to be a painter. Vashti was skinny and had a tendency to be knock-kneed, but I thought she was one of the most gorgeous women I’d ever seen. It was like her quirky red looks turned me on, and the little knock-kneed walk and slightly protruding teeth. Plus, Vashti was dressed up, she was styled like she thought she was in some play where the woman painter goes to a cocktail party and meets the famous writer. Slouch hat pulled down over one eye, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. Full of wisecracks and laughing at her own ironic humor or mine. We wound up in bed much much later in the morning with Vashti saying, “You better not give me a baby. I’m not playing.”

I told her she reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. She said, “Yeh, and you’re the Mad Hatter.” And so I referred to her as Alice for a while. I was going back to New York and she was staying in D.C. But I knew even then that I would see her again. I knew that she would come to New York.

The crowd of dudes I was hanging with had swollen, it seemed that that place on Cooper Square became a meeting place for a certain kind of black intellectual during this period. But it was not just a casual circle anymore, there was clearly something forming, something about to come into being. We sat around trying to talk it and coax it into being. I met Max Stanford, from Philly, who’d recently moved to New York. I didn’t know it at first, but Max was with the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), which had just formed. Larry Neal became a part of that group. Larry, clean as blue wind, would sit in and contribute to those discussions of what was going on in the world, who were we in it, what was the role of the black artist? What should our art be? Larry was a poet, and he too had come up out of Philly and was also, unbeknownst to me, with RAM.

One night, after talking to Max, who had communications with the exiled Rob Williams, and who was actually distributing his newsletter, The Crusader, I felt particularly whipped and beaten. Why? Because, to me, the young tireless revolutionary I saw in Max was what I felt I could never be. I had said outright that the black and white thing was over, but I did not think I could act. For one thing, the little girls, now, were walking around and there was certainly both a deep love and a sense of pressing responsibility there. It seemed to me I was caught, frozen between two worlds. I told this to Nellie, almost weeping, but dragged off to get high and tried to push it out of my mind.

One evening when a large group of us were together in my study talking earnestly about black revolution and what should be done, I got the idea that we should form an organization. On Guard had been long gone, because of its obvious contradictions. We needed a group of black revolutionaries who were artists to raise up the level of struggle from the arts sector. There was Dave Knight, White, Marion, C.D., Leroy McLucas, the Hackensack brothers (Shammy and Tong), Jimmy Lesser, Larry, Max, plus Corny and Clarence. We would form a secret organization. Tong asked me what would it be called, it came into my head in a flash, the Black Arts.

But all those people who’d hung around were not the serious core I felt would cohere with such an idea. I also thought it should be a paramilitary organization. At the next meeting I announced this, and if there were any doubts that some folks would stay and others breeze, that put an end to it. Max and Larry hung back because they were in another organization. Askia, too, who was around there, was not in that core because he too was with RAM and apparently they had been “assigned” to work with us.

White, though he worked with us contributing his art, could never make that core, which was probably a little too fanatical anyway, because of his scag habit. There were other people who came in once we got uptown and who worked with us as strongly and as closely as possible. But while we were downtown the core became McLucas, the Hackensacks, Jimmy Lesser, Dave, Corny, and Clarence. We gave ourselves military ranks, at which Larry smiled, it seemed knowledgeably, saying only, “You’all think you’re ready for that?”

Marion spaced on that, being a little too sophisticated for such playacting, I guess. Bob Thompson was off battling the white powder. Overstreet came up to work at the arts but avoided some of the nuts in that core. So it got down to McLucas, Dave, the Hackensacks, Lesser, Corny, Clarence, and I, with C.D. straddling the fence.

We talked black black, being downtown, amidst the white world, even more frustrated and bitter in contrast to our surroundings, and less realistic than we needed to be. We formed a cadre, but looking at it now, my oldest black friends downtown did not go for the science fiction blackness our downtown core presented. All those people, with the exception of C.D. and McLucas, I had met only relatively recently.

What we did, concretely, was polarize the people downtown. We talked a black militance and took the stance that most of the shit happening downtown was white bullshit and most of the people were too. The fact that we, ourselves, were down there was a contradiction we were not quite ready to act upon, though we discussed it endlessly. With all militant black groups that form downtown, the point of demarcation is always: they are downtown and the masses of black people are elsewhere. For us it was Harlem, that was the proper capital of our world and we were not there.

So we settled for jumping on people, mostly verbally, and preaching the need to be black and ultimately to get out of this downtown white hell.

Because of this “blacker than thou” stance, several relationships were disrupted. We were sincere, most of us. But we carried the fanaticism of the petty bourgeoisie. White through, yesterday; Black as heaven, today!

For one thing, we kept talking and talking about “going uptown.” The On Guards and OYMs came up, partially dissected. Umbra’s struggles were partially discussed. I learned that Ishmael Reed, Hernton, Lorenzo Thomas, Askia, Tom Dent, David Henderson, Steve Cannon, the Hackensacks were grouped among its ranks. Theirs was a positive self-conscious black effort that had existed for some time down on the Lower East Side. But with the twists and turns of U.S. reality and new contradictions, one was splitting into two, they were about to come apart.

Rival sectors of different arts groups, particularly poets and writers, were polarized. The Black Arts group still moved downtown, still my house the unofficial HQ. Some of us had guns and we talked endlessly about black liberation. So that we might go to a poetry reading of Ish’s and Calvin’s and be there both to dig them and also to measure how black they were.

Our deepest feelings were correct, but we had no knowledge of the realities of revolution, not even the realities of the Black Liberation Movement. But still, helter-skelter, twisting and turning, we were putting out the seeds for a Black Arts Movement and the bit of that which we perceived astonished us.

Vashti came up to New York to live. She had a girlfriend she stayed with up on the West Side (who became part of a group of middle-class black women who came to the aid of Betty Shabazz, Malcolm’s widow). But soon we had arranged something. I’d meet her different places, occasionally she even stayed at the Old Albert Hotel on University Place. She began to meet the various people in the Black Arts and go in and out of the watering holes of our downtown world. Sometimes we would go to a friend’s loft and she would talk bad about me getting high, but mostly we talked and laughed and made love. Vashti became part of our crowd, speeding with me through those nights of uncertainty. I came to feel more and more for her. It was like we were at the outset of a great adventure, the deepest part of which we picked up just by watching each other laugh. There was so much love in our eyes. Plus, we felt we were snatching that love from out of some dying white shit. Vashti never talked bad about Nellie, but she would look at me, sometimes, with her hands on her hips, not quite smirking, when the subject came up. There was nothing left for me at Cooper Square now but memories and the little girls. But I felt backed up against the wall.

When the “going uptown” talk started to surface and be talked about, with whatever bias, naturally still more relationships got disrupted. Some of the white women who were with black men (and I guess those white men with black women — though I knew far fewer) got visibly uptight. C.D.’s wife, Françoise, stopped talking to me, and when I started to cross St. Marks Place to talk to him one afternoon, he crossed quickly to say a few words and she stayed on the other side of the street glaring.

I didn’t know most of those who formed this downtown Black Arts “core” very well. But I’m sure some stuff passed publicly that took everything that might be said around me even further out. After all, I had obvious limitations, as leader, hooked up with the white woman. There was some antagonism now between some old friends.

Both of the Hackensacks always made me nervous because I couldn’t understand them. I hadn’t known them long enough or seen them in action and, apparently, they and Askia formed part of the militant wing of Umbra. I found out later, someone had threatened someone else’s life.

But Shammy showed at my house and seemed to want to be my friend-student. Tong was distant and had a bitter cast about him, dipped in a kind of acid silence, that made him seem edgy and challenging. Both were writers, Tong a poet, Shammy a playwright. At a number of places, Shammy, Vashti, and I became a trio.

I got appointed as guest lecturer in drama at Columbia, for one semester, as a result of Dutchman. There was an article I’d written in the Voice, probably it was an interview. Vashti, Shammy, and I were sitting in the West End Bar and Grill after class. I went to the bar to get a beer and these two white guys approached. One a smallish eyeglass-wearing person, the other, a half step behind him, large and bulky. The little one said, “You’re LeRoi Jones?”

“Yes.”

“I saw that statement you made in the Voice about whites. You’re sick.”

I stood, flat-footed, a mug of beer in my hand, and eyed them carefully.

“Why don’t you stop spouting sick things about whites in the paper? It’s blacks that cause the problems.”

“Yeh,” I said. The big guy was grinning.

“I wanted to talk to you.” It was the little guy. “I brought my football-playing friend so you’d agree.”

My forehead heated up quickly at the idea of a henchman intimidator.

“You gonna talk to us?”

“Fuck you.” I was turning to go to my table. The big dude moved forward hesitatingly. I hit him full in the forehead with the beer mug and, with no break in the motion, bopped the other one headside as well. They screamed, the small one fell, others stood and shouted. Vashti and Shammy were at my side. We backed out of the West End like gunfighters.

“Very good, Mr. Jones,” was Shammy’s comment. Vashti laughed and pulled on my arm.

One other event to show how far the thing had gone. I was sitting with Shammy, who had begun to accompany me different places, in line with our paramilitary pretensions. We were in the restaurant of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where I’d met with my editor about some book. As we ate, unknown to us, C.D. entered the sleek restaurant. He came up to our table and said to me and Shammy, “Leave me alone. Leave my family alone. I’m not going uptown.” He touched his belt. “I have a gun here. If anyone bothers me or my family, I’ll shoot them!” He turned and left.

Shammy and I laughed, but for me, it was a deadly portent somehow. C.D. had been one of my oldest friends in New York. But the two of us at the table made light of it. He was hooked on white women, etc. I could talk.

February 21, 1965, a Sunday. Nellie and I and the two girls were at the Eighth Street Bookstore, at a book party. I had a cap, hunting jacket, and round dark glasses, the dress of our little core. I was being personable and knowledgeable. Both Vashti and Shammy and some others were in the bookstore, discreetly separate from my party.

Suddenly, Leroy McLucas came in. He was weeping. “Malcolm is dead! Malcolm is dead! Malcolm’s been killed!” He wept, repeating it over and over. I was stunned, shot myself. I felt stupid, ugly, useless. Downtown in my mix-matched family and my maximum leader/teacher shot dead while we bullshitted and pretended.

The black core of us huddled there, my wife and family outside that circle. We were feverish and stupefied. McLucas wept uncontrollably. I called a couple fellows in the corner over, but they were dazed and couldn’t hear immediately. Joel Oppenheimer said, “That’s the trouble with the black revolution. Roi’s giving directions and nobody listens!”

But who and what was I to give anything, or he to make such a statement? “It’s all bullshit!” went through me. “All!”

In a few days I had gotten my stuff out and gone uptown. We had seen a brownstone on West 130th Street and this was to be the home of the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School.

My little girl, the older one, Kellie, picked up instinctively a sense of my departure. She said to me, “You can’t go anywhere. You’re one of the funny things.”

But in a minute or so, I was gone. A bunch of us, really, had gone, up to Harlem. Seeking revolution!

Posted by Kofi Natambu at 10:09 AM

Long Live the Black Radical Tradition: IN TRIBUTE TO AND CELEBRATION OF THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE, ART, AND LEGACY OF LEROI JONES/AMIRI BARAKA. Happy 92nd birthday Amiri!--Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 17:00:00 +0000

“There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you.”

--Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1934-2014)

PHOTO: Leroi Jones in his apartment in Harlem, NYC 1966

Jitterbugs
by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
(1934-2014)

The imperfection of the world
is a burden, if you know it, think
about it, at all. Look up in the sky
wishing you were free, placed so terribly
in time, mind out among new stars, working
propositions, and not this planet where you
cant go anywhere without an awareness of the hurt the white man has put on the people. Any people. You cant escape, there's no where to go. They have made this star unsafe, and this age, primitive, though yr mind is somewhere else, your ass aint.

(Published in Negro Digest, April 1966)

RED LIGHT

by Leroi Jones aka Amiri Baraka, 1966

The only thing we know is the thing we turn out to be. I don't care what you think, it's true, now you think your way out of this

..."LeRoi wanted to be a writer in a time before the hyper-professionalisation of the craft. Black writers coming of age in the 1950s weren’t told they had to get MFAs. Baldwin hadn’t gone to college, Langston Hughes had dropped out. LeRoi had been at Howard with Toni Morrison, and though she’d finished, she hadn’t yet published her first book by the time he, a ‘drop-out,’ had. The most heralded writers were living adventurous and very raw social lives, not yet mediated by the demands of universities, and their art imitated their very singular modes of existence. The United States had yet to convince the entire population it was middle class and had a vested interest in the continuation of the status quo, so that these same writers were belligerently opposed to how their nation was being run, how their families and friends were being forced to live, in Harlem, in Paris, in Bohemia, everywhere capitalism was sold. Without the flimsy safety-net of bureaucratic writing and literature degrees, writers were not as busy pandering to that machine and could be honest about its dirty grooves. So instead of being in a classroom in a system scripted by Western ideology and pedagogy, instead of being indoctrinated in the merits of unconditional ‘objectivity,’ LeRoi was writing his own script, fumbling, but on his own terms. And so there was no sense of propriety or trepidation when the call came inviting him to a newly Communist country, and when presented with Fidel and Robert Williams, LeRoi Jones didn’t have a counter-indoctrination in the primacy of democratic ideas to make him resent their revolutionary thinking. Instead, that domestic life he repeatedly described as passionless withered as he observed the unanimous youthful exuberance of the Cuban people, the real people who labor with their whole bodies, basking in the glory of their hard-won revolution. A less sincere man would have pretended he saw some tentativeness or misery in Cuba, but LeRoi couldn’t lie to himself—what he saw was joy and triumph and unbending solidarity. Because LeRoi was improvising his life, it made sense for him to land on the one with the rest of the free and young peoples of the world. Because most of us are following procedure and programs today, so many decades later, the society deeper in its decay, the bureaucracy more intimate and better at hiding and stylizing itself, it makes sense that our collective pitch is flustered with self-righteous democratic ideals. Today’s would-be black radicals are in big-name schools living on stipends or loans or salaries from those schools, while spouting off about the revolution, or they’re self-satisfied in organizations that try to solve racial warfare without addressing class warfare and end up endorsing Hillary Clinton, like good tokens. I don’t know if anyone’s going to Cuba or saying yes to anything that volatile on a whim, unless it’s for the clout or the resorts and mind-numbing ready-made vacation packages. I don’t know if anyone’s that spontaneous and undifferentiated anymore.

What LeRoi Jones and Amiri Baraka possess is, first, the good sense to be secular and still born again in this life, but also, enough love of beauty and truth to manage being true artists and demanding of themselves a clear and practiced ideological stance, one that implicates even the commodification of their own work. That tenacity, born of having nothing to gain or lose from the establishment, no nostalgia for the comfort of the rich university or the black capitalist lifestyle, comes with a fearlessness that today’s black literary figures really don’t access in the same way, and aren’t incentivised to support or respect or protect from the dangers that accompany it. We aren’t willing to get in trouble, that’s how deeply troubled we are. Our last radical almost died in solitary confinement humming Coltrane after the 1967 Newark Rebellion, during which police had targeted him and nearly beaten him to death. Our last radical was still raising and ruining hell in his 70s, accusing the state of every crime, teaching all of us who would listen how not to play the victim. Our last radical transcended the limits of form with the power of his substance and wrote in so many styles he shattered the idea of singularity or brand, ruined himself for black capitalism. We should thank him. Our last radical never led a revolution, but at least he wasn’t afraid of his own revolutionary shadow, at least he couldn’t be broken by abrupt and radical transformation into that shadow’s space, at least he had the good sense to spend the rest of his life after Cuba trying to incite revolt in every way he knew how—in himself, in his peers, in his community, in his pupils, in his family. Every day of Amiri’s life after Cuba was animated by that Revolutionary spirit..."
--by Harmony Holiday"The Last Black Radical: How Cuba Turned LeRoi Jones Into Amiri Baraka", Poetry Foundation, December 10, 2018

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/blog/open-door/80978/the-last-black-radical

“What’s Past is Prologue…”

All.

Please Note: I’m reprinting the entirety of this wonderful essay below because I know Amiri would have loved this piece and deeply appreciated the author for writing it…

Kofi

Open Door

The Last Black Radical: How Cuba Turned LeRoi Jones Into Amiri Baraka

by Harmony Holiday
December 10, 2018
Poetry Foundation

PHOTO: Leroi Jones. by Carl Van Vechten © Van Vechten Trust. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 1962

"Five hundred years from now, most of what we say today will seem like children’s singing." —Chairman Mao

"Do you wish America was a communist country? Sure, I wish the world was, actually." —Amiri Baraka in the USA, 2002

"I’m a poet, I write, that’s all, I’m not even interested in politics." —LeRoi Jones in Cuba, 1959

False Consciousness

It’s thrilling, sometimes, to overlook the obvious for long enough that the blink of awakening is so overdue for you when it arrives, sudden and almost criminal for being so distant before, that it feels choreographed somewhere in the ripping catatonic laughter of ghosts of the future, half minstrel/half sphinx, a cauldron of dread and readiness. I’ve been so used to heroic meaning what it means to me, accustomed to the happy fact that all of my heroes are black and crazy-blue and full of tender militancy and the most beautiful at being that—I’ve been so comfortable accumulating their data, mapping their endless battles, denouncing anyone who conspired against them, and blaming my impeccable taste for my love of difficult souls, that I forgot to ask why. Not only why that particular karass is most heroic to me or why that breed of black spirit makes me feel safest and proudest and most like myself in the world, but also why or how the black radical happens in the United States of America, a country that runs on trends and norms, the utter boredom of their recurrence blotted out by a collective cowardice that stops most everyone from breaking with tradition in deliberate or sustainable ways. We mostly accept that there’s a black radical tradition like sloganeers looking for mascots, the same manner in which we accept that there’s a literary cannon shooting its tantrum of blanks into our sense of purposed storytelling and poetics and rebellion through artistic expression. But what really constitutes that black radical tradition we so readily nod in, and how does such an unpopular club of outcasts and recluses and rebel geniuses elect its members, and how do the members find themselves ready candidates? What makes a black radical, what is her conduit? Who is a black radical? Why, how, for how long? Why do so many of us cling to rotting roots and avoid becoming so, avoiding the departure from any depleted source that is radicalization? And how many of the black radicals brave enough to be that survive their own awakening or hostile CIA spying and conspiring like Cointelpro or the blasphemy of the indifferent masses.

My favorite black radical, the artist formerly known as LeRoi Jones, I’d assumed until recently was born with a special capacity for revolutionary consciousness, not made that way. And I was wrong. LeRoi was a born artist, yes, a native poet in a legacy of black, such an avid Jazz listener that he was honorary musician, but before visiting Cuba in July of 1959, that was the extent of his radicalism. In his 20s, when it was up to him, LeRoi was a black man surrounded by white bohemians, married to one, not too concerned with politics, maybe even complacent about the state of the world, and trying to feign the feigned disaffectedness of some of his white peers. Sometimes his early poems seemed to lament his double consciousness, and assume that tone of elevated privacy that poems of privilege are so good at assuming when they pretend to let you in the room for a few lines, only to leave you more deeply attuned to your exile when they demand retreat. Any outrage LeRoi carried at this stage was subtle enough to seem distant from the flesh. He even spoke in a vacant, disembodied tone, then, left air in his esophagus for the elocution of his poetry, didn’t grind and groan language into the atmosphere but let it hang there in monotone as if he was the tarot’s hanged man and committed to that costume. This allowed him to recite poems like “Black Dada Nihilismus” and seem abstract when he promised: “may a lost god or Damballah rest or save us against the murders we intend, against his lost white children.” And it was beautiful, his broken style, a sunny hip and listless counter-violence that carried no true threat, and its neutered strut would have destroyed him, made him pseudo and self-loathing and impossible over time. A call LeRoi received one vague hungover Saturday afternoon, asking if he wanted to visit Cuba, was the beginning of his new birth. He was rescued from dilettantism by chance, intervened on, actualized.

‘Where had I obtained such a fake morality?’

The poet and part-time magazine publisher, with a young daughter and a Jewish wife, is 24 in the summer of 1959. He’s been from a Newark upbringing during which his parents, his mother a social worker and his father a postal worker, made sure he knew exactly why his grandfather had fled the South (Klansmen had set fire to his store), why they were stationed in this glib New Jersey city. LeRoi went from his Newark upbringing to Rutgers, then to Howard University, where he met poet and professor Sterling Brown, who inculcated him in black music and the style it suggests for literature and for thought formation. Leroi was given permission to improvise and respect himself for it by a writer and professor whom he respected and admired. Nonetheless, Amiri failed out of Howard because he had taken it as more of a social experiment than an academic one, learned more outside of the classroom than inside of it, was that kind of slick lawless genius, and out of humiliation for failing out and fear of disappointing his parents, LeRoi joined the Airforce, or “Error Farce” as he nicknamed it, and served as librarian on his base in Puerto Rico while enlisted, in order to continue his education, ordering every book he would have encountered from Howard to Harvard. He was ultimately discharged for reading Marx, but that’s all he was doing with that leftist energy at the time, reading it, bowing toward it in hesitant and studious reverence.

In Manhattan, after having been discharged, LeRoi worked at a bookstore and then eventually for a Jazz magazine called the Record Changer, and he lived alone in a coldwater flat in the Village. In this first life, LeRoi was in fervent pursuit of an informed literary bohemianism that felt real but also glamorous in its hyper-awareness of the honest efforts at racial and economic integration that the lifestyle fetishized. This usually meant black men with white women feeling a kind of dispassionate transgressiveness and afraid to ever give up their access to that whiteness for their hood pass, ever again. In the Village the young LeRoi Jones could sleep with white women and meet rich painters and discuss Jazz on the job. When his girlfriend and co-worker at the magazine discovered she was pregnant for a second time in their relationship, they married. “There was still no passion,” he promises self-consciously in his autobiography, “or maybe I didn’t understand passion then.” Their lives became a little more square with marriage. LeRoi got a little more serious about his writing and published his first poem, “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” in a small literary magazine before starting his own magazine, Yugen, where he would publish himself and poets he enjoyed, mostly Beats and other New Americans.

LeRoi Jones was on a path toward middle-class comfort with a stylish self-aware edge, and the rush he seemed to derive from his proximity to whiteness was palpable then, if only to him at first. I’m sure it would have grown more transparent or more like imitation, vain token ambition, assimilation. But the god in the machine wasn’t having that, not for him. In summer of 1959, LeRoi receives a call from Richard Gibson, a former CBS news correspondent who was fired shortly after forming the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Richard wants to know if our favorite black bohemian will replace Langston Hughes on a trip to Cuba, to ‘see what’s really going on down there.’ No poet turns down an adventure of that scale, even if it’s propped up by the State Department and precarious on several levels, even if he’s busy reveling in double hipness and liberated from passion by reason and responsibility and thinks he can make that last, and so his answer was yes, yes!

Through every phase of dutiful assimilation into the white superficially integrated art world LeRoi had infiltrated, and through every transformation leading up to the roles he played knowingly or otherwise in the Village, LeRoi Jones remained at heart and in spirit, sincere, almost desperate for ways to express that restless sincerity and also rescue himself from its peril: vulnerability. He had been doing what he thought he had to do to enact his version of the American Hustle, aka the American Dream Deferred, aka disappear into an idea of a black writer to become one. When this sudden invitation to Cuba came, it came as divine intervention at a time when he was not yet ruined by having too many white role models as a black man, though he had been dangling over the precipice of those seductive ruins. He still had room to become more like himself when the invitation to Cuba arrived like a messenger. And like one of his favorite musicians, Thelonious Monk, explains, “a genius is the one who is most like himself.” LeRoi still had the emotional space for the kind of salvation that only comes to sincere witnesses willing to testify, and be changed.

Tell Me About Harlem

LeRoi’s recountments of his voyage to Cuba and back are as a black Ulysses. The journey begins in a soothing monotony of mishaps as the group of black artists, intellectuals, and models, actors, philosophers, assembles, first at the airport in New York where they are told they have no tickets and have to battle and wait an entire day to board a flight, and then at the modest or borderline raggedy hotel in Cuba, where they begin making each other’s acquaintance and drinking and trying to figure out what kind of fair-played ambush Cuba and Richard Gibson plan for their souls, not realizing it’s already underway. On July 21, 1959, the Cuban Revolution was nominally complete. The rebel army defeated the Batista government and the rich landlords were being abruptly and unequivocally kicked off their land. The country was in the process of “Latifundia,” or land redistribution. No one could own more than 1000 acres and all peasant farmers would be given 66 acres of their own with which to reinvent their dreams. This meant no more monocrop of sugarcane, and automatically American Sugar was kicked out along with United Fruit, corporations that had raped the land and created a seasonal economy that gave farmers three months of underpaid work annually and left them to starve for the remaining months. LeRoi was learning all of this for the first time, and also watching the people of Cuba, supporters of the revolution, the same ones who the previous corporate-driven economy had strangled; so inspired, the air was electric, the chaos a kind of never ending hallucination, it hypnotized him out of that infatuation with stiff Western bohemianism and toward a love of what is real and penetrating.

He meets Robert Williams, a former head of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, a former advocate of nonviolence who changed his pacifist message after the cops violently attacked black citizens in that town. Robert suggested that all black people carry guns from that point on and was exiled for his call to arms. He meets Fidel Castro and hears him speak and asks, “what do you intend to do with this revolution?” “Whatever the people want,” is Fidel’s response, as he explains that he’s not a Communist but a Radical Humanist. On the 14-hour train ride to the small town outside of Havana, where LeRoi encounters Castro, along with 40,000 additional Cubans eagerly awaiting address from their new leader, LeRoi encounters a Mexican student with whom he talks the entire way to that town. He explains how he’s not into politics, how he’s a poet. He’s emphatically mocked and attacked for that dodgy American approach to aesthetics. You want to cultivate your soul? You want to cultivate your soul? Those around him ask, tauntingly. He’s called a Yanqui Imperialist, a sell-out, a hypocrite, a fool. He’s brought close to tears on that endless train. And then someone says, as a culminating jab at his character and fidelities: “Tell me about Harlem.”

When LeRoi gets back to Havana from that speech attended by thousands of singing and cheering Cuban citizens awaiting their new land in the warm rain, in the blistering heat—an American paper reads, “Cuban Speech Rained Out.” He runs away from the newstand and that propaganda like he’s being chased by his own ghost.

PHOTO: Amiri Baraka seated first on left from the head of the table. To his left is Robert F. Williams Photo courtesy of New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Something in the Way

It would have been impossible for anyone or anything to deliberately enter LeRoi Jones’s bohemian experiment in the Village and make him militant with a little proof of black and brown bodies suffering and resisting across the globe, or of those same bodies staging successful revolutions and claiming tangible Reparations. He would have rebutted them with talk of Zen and integration, defensive, defending his access to his passion-free romance with the Village and the bureaucratic tidiness of its hopeless mess. In 1957 the Civil Rights Movement truly began and maybe as it progressed so too would LeRoi Jones’s social and political consciousness have advanced, but even if that had been the case, LeRoi was, before Cuba, upholding a sense of performed decency he had borrowed from the white world, one that protected that world better than it did himself, one that left him politically barren. For example, while in Cuba Mr. Jones balked at their open carrying of weapons until it was explained to him that they had to be prepared for a counter-insurgency in the aftermath of such a young and controversial revolution. It would not have been far-fetched for Cubans to expect America to send troops to help reclaim its access to their fertile tropical paradise, in the name of freedom. So while intentionally attempting to radicalize LeRoi Jones by telling him about the Cuban Revolution and Fidel and the people carrying weapons in self-defense, might have failed, or worse, backfired, and inspired him to deeper allegiance with his borderline-bourgeois Greenwich Village lifestyle as a kind of poetics of pacifism—sending the same young poet to Cuba in the electrified aftermath of that Revolution to show him its most pragmatic achievements firsthand, ruined him for all forms of Americanism and made his bohemian experiment in the Village feel quaint and vapid. He returned not only radical but deeply unimpressed with what he had formerly seen as the apotheosis of creative expression in the United States. Revolution was now the most inspired creative act in his estimation, and literature would have to support its aims and help establish a revolutionary consciousness in the United States and globally. After Cuba, Amiri had to unequivocally choose a side, and the one he chose made him the foil to his own former self, his own worst enemy. The “Suicide Note” that was his first published poem became eerily accurate prophecy. LeRoi Jones died and Amiri Baraka would be his resurrection.

What was packaged as the Black Arts Movement and spearheaded by Amiri and Larry Neal wouldn’t begin until 1968, almost a decade after Cuba, but in the interim LeRoi becomes famous for a play he writes one night in a frenzy, Dutchman, a piece in which a black middle-class commuter named Clay is murdered on the New York Subway by an obsessive, histrionic white woman who tries to seduce him and, when she fails, kills him. LeRoi Jones as an identity is undergoing the same crisis his character Clay faces, and he too is killed with the fictive blade in the play. Not by domestic malice as much as by his soul’s backlash against his own former imitation of life. LeRoi wins an Obie award for Dutchman and between that recognition and the publication of his first book of poems in 1961, he can add fame to the series of traps rigging around him.

What’s different post-Cuba is that LeRoi Jones is militant now and armed with Marxist ideology. The traps are trivial compared to what he now knows and cannot unlearn. He now understands class struggle and how the concept of race blinds many to the tyranny of class within Monopoly Capitalism. Now he knows exactly how programmed and naïve he’s been to think that he could make his best work in some tragic state of ambivalence, now he realizes he must not only pick a side but reinvent the aesthetic of that side. He’s been shamed into awakening. He does want to cultivate his soul, but not in the naïve apolitical way he had pined for before Cuba. Now he longs for the soulful and radical decency he witnessed there. He writes a manifesto on what he calls the Revolutionary Theatre around this time, and begins to realize his vision of an artistic life that is not at all separate from the mundane, so that the theatre can be woven into small daily acts and with it Marxist ideology, militant black consciousness, the will to actual power, the pursuit of Revolution.

Ghosts of the Future

What I’d overlooked is the swift and ruthless moment of radicalization in the life of LeRoi Jones. I was inordinately ready to attribute his rare combination of lucid political courage and activism and unconditional love for black people to his hermetic artistic talent, to the abyss of genius, and I couldn’t see him for the foolish, tripping-over-himself, manchild he’d once been or comprehend how narrowly he’d escaped a lifetime of aimless recklessness, when he said yes to Cuba. And why it matters so much exactly how LeRoi Jones became Amiri Baraka is because his transformation reveals why he has no successor in any of us.

LeRoi wanted to be a writer in a time before the hyper-professionalisation of the craft. Black writers coming of age in the 1950s weren’t told they had to get MFAs. Baldwin hadn’t gone to college, Langston Hughes had dropped out. LeRoi had been at Howard with Toni Morrison, and though she’d finished, she hadn’t yet published her first book by the time he, a ‘drop-out,’ had. The most heralded writers were living adventurous and very raw social lives, not yet mediated by the demands of universities, and their art imitated their very singular modes of existence. The United States had yet to convince the entire population it was middle class and had a vested interest in the continuation of the status quo, so that these same writers were belligerently opposed to how their nation was being run, how their families and friends were being forced to live, in Harlem, in Paris, in Bohemia, everywhere capitalism was sold. Without the flimsy safety-net of bureaucratic writing and literature degrees, writers were not as busy pandering to that machine and could be honest about its dirty grooves. So instead of being in a classroom in a system scripted by Western ideology and pedagogy, instead of being indoctrinated in the merits of unconditional ‘objectivity,’ LeRoi was writing his own script, fumbling, but on his own terms. And so there was no sense of propriety or trepidation when the call came inviting him to a newly Communist country, and when presented with Fidel and Robert Williams, LeRoi Jones didn’t have a counter-indoctrination in the primacy of democratic ideas to make him resent their revolutionary thinking. Instead, that domestic life he repeatedly described as passionless withered as he observed the unanimous youthful exuberance of the Cuban people, the real people who labor with their whole bodies, basking in the glory of their hard-won revolution. A less sincere man would have pretended he saw some tentativeness or misery in Cuba, but LeRoi couldn’t lie to himself—what he saw was joy and triumph and unbending solidarity. Because LeRoi was improvising his life, it made sense for him to land on the one with the rest of the free and young peoples of the world. Because most of us are following procedure and programs today, so many decades later, the society deeper in its decay, the bureaucracy more intimate and better at hiding and stylizing itself, it makes sense that our collective pitch is flustered with self-righteous democratic ideals. Today’s would-be black radicals are in big-name schools living on stipends or loans or salaries from those schools, while spouting off about the revolution, or they’re self-satisfied in organizations that try to solve racial warfare without addressing class warfare and end up endorsing Hillary Clinton, like good tokens. I don’t know if anyone’s going to Cuba or saying yes to anything that volatile on a whim, unless it’s for the clout or the resorts and mind-numbing ready-made vacation packages. I don’t know if anyone’s that spontaneous and undifferentiated anymore.

What LeRoi Jones and Amiri Baraka possess is, first, the good sense to be secular and still born again in this life, but also, enough love of beauty and truth to manage being true artists and demanding of themselves a clear and practiced ideological stance, one that implicates even the commodification of their own work. That tenacity, born of having nothing to gain or lose from the establishment, no nostalgia for the comfort of the rich university or the black capitalist lifestyle, comes with a fearlessness that today’s black literary figures really don’t access in the same way, and aren’t incentivised to support or respect or protect from the dangers that accompany it. We aren’t willing to get in trouble, that’s how deeply troubled we are. Our last radical almost died in solitary confinement humming Coltrane after the 1967 Newark Rebellion, during which police had targeted him and nearly beaten him to death. Our last radical was still raising and ruining hell in his 70s, accusing the state of every crime, teaching all of us who would listen how not to play the victim. Our last radical transcended the limits of form with the power of his substance and wrote in so many styles he shattered the idea of singularity or brand, ruined himself for black capitalism. We should thank him. Our last radical never led a revolution, but at least he wasn’t afraid of his own revolutionary shadow, at least he couldn’t be broken by abrupt and radical transformation into that shadow’s space, at least he had the good sense to spend the rest of his life after Cuba trying to incite revolt in every way he knew how—in himself, in his peers, in his community, in his pupils, in his family. Every day of Amiri’s life after Cuba was animated by that Revolutionary spirit.

Venceremos

I keep trying to imagine Amiri’s story or one like it occurring today, keep fantasizing about a man or woman not coopted by righteous neoliberal agitprop by the time his mind starts forming visions of Reparations and land redistribution. I keep trying to imagine a Black American writer visiting Cuba today, 60 ridiculous American years after LeRoi’s visit to that idyllic island. Today’s approximation is at the beach, or some conference everyone’s paid to attend so that he can collect a stipend for teaching workshops, like the ones commodified at the colleges but with lower stakes. Fidel is long dead in his imagination and in fact, the artist keeps busy drinking rum at the resorts and sulking over a blue screen or filming a music video about Vodun, featuring a cast of nameless female muses gathered around a vintage car that they’ve been washing for an eternity. The female writer is one of those women or off in a national library somewhere, digging up information on some American poets in the 1960s who went to Cuba and came back swinging and even as she perfects her swing, it echoes a limp roar, gets lonely. There’s no current movement that isn’t mostly vanity or some other drab spectacle of emptiness. There’s no plan in place for our own cultural institutions, spaces not funded by corporations we then have to spend our energy pandering to, like helpless demagogues. We’ve objectified every level of life, put it all on the free market, the space for revolt that remains in our hearts is there because of a break, not the boon of an opening, our hearts carry a numb collective wound gained while fighting this blind war on our own psyches, and we constantly leak pieces of ourselves into the machine. How do we radicalize ourselves now, in this mire, with all of its trapdoors and skeletons and temptations to become another deluded anointed one, temptations to just run in place while saying all the right ‘progressive’ things? Do we even desire radical black consciousness, or have we really become fellow capitalists just fighting to be peaceful bureaucrats and own homes and feel that American sense of entitlement and tell ourselves how original we are when we make a new piece of art to sell and still don’t own any publishing companies, still don’t control its distribution.

I think a lot of the depression that haunts so many communities comes from the collective declaration of false desires, pretending we want to change the system when we’d rather blame it for our lives and use it for crumbs and comfort, pretending we want to be more than we are when the work of exceeding ourselves isn’t casual or prefabricated enough for our branded daily acts. To be radical, and militantly so, is to really admit and really feel that you don’t want the way of life gleaming in the American Promise, not as fetish or consolation prize or Reparations, that you want and need to believe in the prospect of a new world, new ways of being in this world, and that you are willing to look crazy as you work to embody that potentiality with each and every breath. Radicalism is extreme, it’s ridiculous, it’s devastating black magic, a spell that cannot be broken, not at all precious or safe or familiar or Yeezy season 4 or Bard or Harvard or even Harlem, not a kind of voguing despair but actual ecstatic despair or disgust that forces one to change or die. I don’t know anyone that beautiful and willing to be mistaken and taken under today. I don’t know anyone crazy and rational enough to really save the world from all of us. Our last black radical was that. Amiri Baraka was that. Fidel was that. Malcolm was that. Harriet was that. Nina was that. Sun Ra was that. All this could be that if we would stop pretending catastrophes are movies, stop pretending society's evils are vague fictions nobody is accountable for and that we can all be spectators instead of witnesses, so that no one ever testifies except as victim. Maybe soon we’ll have a new heroic screamer to lift that myth and teach us our real names, a new exodus to answer yes. A new reality is better than a new movie. I wanna be ready that day, ready to be that brave and helplessly sincere and real to myself; I want to be both screamer and she who must respond yes to her own awakening. I want to say I remember Cuba, I remember Haiti, I’ll remember April, I remember Amiri, I’ll remember Clay, is this tomorrow? Venceremos. I want to be radicalized by the urgency of now and found answering the unanticipated call, yes. This to me is our only chance at some semblance of salvation in the Western world, all of us becoming a version of the last black radical in a frenzied unison, all of us reaching the impossible edge of consciousness and surpassing it, discarding the rotting roots, bloody roots of this savage society, or using them as kindling.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Born in Waterloo, Iowa, poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday is the daughter of Northern Soul singer/songwriter Jimmy Holiday. Her father died when she was five, and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles. Holiday earned a BA in rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA at Columbia University. She is the author of Negro League Baseball (2011), winner of the Fence Books Motherwell Prize; Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues (Ricochet Editions, 2013), a “dos-a-dos” book featuring poetry, letters, and essays; and Hollywood Forever (Fence Books, 2017), which she is turning into an afroballet. She is currently working on a biography of Abbey Lincoln and an epic called M a a f A (2019), an exploration of reparations and the body.

Holiday has taught dance at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and is the founder of Mythscience, an arts collective devoted to cross-disciplinary work that helps artists re-engage with their bodies and the physical world in this so-called digital age, and the Afrosonics archive of jazz and everyday diaspora poetics. In 2013 she was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Los Angeles.

https://vimeo.com/107619665?autoplay=1&muted=1&stream_id=Y2xpcHN8MzI1Nzc1MzJ8aWQ6ZGVzY3xbXQ%3D%3D

THE BLUES PEOPLE 50 YEARS LATER

SchomburgCBFS

Inspired by Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), a generation of scholars in the field of Jazz and Blues music history and criticism was born, creating a legitimate space in the academy for the serious study of African American music. Joining Amiri Baraka in this conversation-- reflecting on the years between Baraka’s Blues People and his Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Music -- will be two major scholars in this field: Ingrid Monson and John Szwed.

Video length: 38 minutes and 30 seconds

[Uploaded on September 30, 2014]

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka is one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers. With the beginning of Black Civil Rights Movements during the sixties, Baraka explored the anger of African-Americans and used his writings as a weapon against racism. Also, he advocated scientific socialism with his revolutionary inclined poems and aimed at creating aesthetic through them. Amiri Baraka’s writing career spans over nearly fifty years and has mostly focused on the subjects of Black Liberation and White Racism. He is counted among the few influential political activists who have spent most of their lifetime fighting for the rights of African-Americans.

Ingrid Monson
Harvard University

Dr. Ingrid Monson is the Quincy Jones Professor of Jazz at Harvard and the author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call out to Jazz and Africa. She has a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Musicology from NYU, and a B.M. from New England Conservatory. Professor Monson won the Sonneck Society's 1998 Irving Lowens Prize for the best book in American music for her 1996 Saying Something, Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. She was also a founding member of the nationally known Klezmer Conservatory Band, and plays trumpet with jazz and salsa bands. She is working on a book on the music of the African Diaspora.

John Szwed
Columbia University

Dr. John Szwed is the Director of Jazz Studies at Columbia where he is also Professor of Music and Jazz Studies and the author of Jazz 101. Dr. Szwed’s publications range from anthropological studies of Newfoundland and the West Indies to record liner notes and jazz journalism. Before he joined Columbia, Szwed taught Anthropology, African American Studies, and Film Studies for many years at Yale University, and also received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. He is President of the non-profit music production company Brilliant Corners, which is based in New York City.

Video Recording:

https://vimeo.com/107619665

Inspired by Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), a generation of scholars in the field of Jazz and Blues music history and criticism was born, creating a legitimate space in the academy for the serious study of African American music. Joining Amiri Baraka in this conversation-- reflecting on the years between Baraka’s Blues People and his Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Music -- will be two major scholars in this field: Ingrid Monson and John Szwed.

Fifty years ago Blues People was the first book-length history written by an African American that addressed the social, musical, economic, and cultural influences of the blues and jazz on American history. His approach to music criticism was different from anything else that existed when he first began writing in the 1950s and 60s, partly because he was the only black writer in a field of white critics. Furthermore, he was not simply describing the music, but he was also fashioning a type of prose writing that was itself an artistic performance about music.

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: In wake of rabid ongoing violence by ICE agents throughout the country against immigrants and American citizens alike, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani demands that ICE be completely abolished and permanently removed from his city while Wajahat Ali and Robert Pape Denounce the vile demented plan by the pathologically sadistic madman in the white house to order the Pentagon and its sociopathic warmongering Defense Department head Pete Hegseth to livestream a firing squad execution of a criminally convicted soldier in the military. Ali also calls for a thoroughgoing critique of Republicans who have left their party in protest of Trump’s dominance of the GOP while giving highly problematic and bad faith “advice” to Democratic candidates to maintain and expand their cowardly movement to the right on crucial issues like Palestine, immigration and economic policy under the cover of a deeply corporate. ‘Never Trump’ banner Meanwhile Trump promotes and calls for openly white supremacist and ‘race war’ strategies attacking Somali American citizens in Minnesota and Arab American Muslim candidate for Senate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 11:36:47 +0000

Trump’s America: Political Violence & a Livestreamed Execution | Robert Pape

Wajahat Ali

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rzWmE7liwE

October 8, 2026

#RobertPape #WajahatAli #Trump

What does it mean for American politics when a military execution is scheduled to be livestreamed for the public? Robert Pape joins Wajahat Ali to discuss Trump, political violence, military power, public executions, the death penalty and the consequences of normalizing violence in American public life. On October 8, the Pentagon confirmed that it plans to livestream the scheduled December 3 firing-squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the public should be able to watch the execution, arguing that people need to understand the consequences of serious crimes. President Donald Trump approved the firing-squad method earlier in the week. The planned broadcast has prompted questions about the purpose of making an execution a public spectacle, the ethics of state punishment and the legal issues surrounding the unprecedented livestream. Hasan may still pursue legal challenges that could delay the scheduled date. Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who studies military strategy and escalation, also examines how the use of force can create consequences leaders do not anticipate. In his analysis of the Iran war, he has warned that initial military successes can trigger further escalation rather than produce the intended political outcome. How should Americans understand the relationship between political rhetoric, military power and state-sanctioned violence? And what are the risks when violence becomes a tool of public messaging? Robert Pape and Wajahat Ali explore American political violence, the death penalty, Trump’s military policies, escalation and the future of U.S. democracy.

#RobertPape #WajahatAli #Trump #PoliticalViolence #DeathPenalty #Pentagon #USPolitics #Military #IranWar #AmericanPolitics

Wajahat Ali Calls Out Tim Miller & The Bulwark | The Vanguard

Wajahat Ali

October 9, 2026

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpXbBnvNSGU

#WajahatAli #TheVanguard #TimMiller

Wajahat Ali joins The Vanguard for a candid discussion about Tim Miller, The Bulwark, Never Trump Republicans, and the influence of centrist political consultants on the Democratic Party. In this conversation, Wajahat challenges the role of former Republicans and establishment figures in shaping Democratic strategy, arguing that party leaders risk alienating their own voters when they move to the right on issues including Palestine, immigration, economic policy, and civil liberties. The discussion examines the tensions between progressives and Never Trump conservatives, the debate over who speaks for the Democratic base, and the questions surrounding The Bulwark’s relationship with Democratic leaders and donors. Topics include: Tim Miller and The Bulwark Never Trump Republicans and Democratic strategy Corporate centrists and political consultants Progressive Democrats and the party’s direction Palestine, ICE, and the issues shaping the Democratic base The debate over whether Democrats should move to the center or reconnect with progressive voters Watch Wajahat Ali on The Vanguard and join the conversation about the future of the Democratic Party.

#WajahatAli #TheVanguard #TimMiller #TheBulwark #Democrats #Progressives #NeverTrump #USPolitics #PoliticalCommentary

https://zeteo.com/p/donald-trump-is-trying-to-start-a?publication

First Draft

Donald Trump Is Trying to Start a Race War to Win the Midterms

The president’s attacks on Abdul El-Sayed and Somali Americans are appalling and show the dangerous path he is on. A U.S. diplomat in Israel, meanwhile, was shown to be working in Israel’s interest.

by Martin Pengelly
October 9, 2026
Zeteo

A quick note to say there will be no ‘First Draft’ on Monday, as Zeteo observes the Indigenous Peoples’ Day holiday. Enjoy your long weekend – and normal service will resume first thing Tuesday morning.

Good morning. Martin here again, delighted to be bringing you the news that matters for your Friday morning. Rejoice, for a long weekend is nearly here.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we look at an outburst from Donald Trump that was vile and dangerous even by his wretched standards, a broadside against Somali immigrants in Minnesota and a call for “the people of Minnesota” to “fight back.” When calls for violence are coming from inside the (White) House, America is really in trouble. Trump also spouted vile Islamophobic abuse at Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, who duly faced similar bile from Mike Rogers, his GOP opponent, on the debate stage in Grand Rapids.

Then we’ll look at a bombshell report from the New York Times, about how a close aide to Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is co-opting embassy practice to his own, openly pro-Israel ends. There was also a Senate debate in Georgia, and the Nobel Peace Prize goes to someone who has called out Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Let’s read in.

‘Fight Back, Minnesota’

Donald Trump during his “Golden Age of American Innovation Summit” in Washington, DC, on Oct. 8, 2026. Photo: Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images.

The president of the United States is trying to start a race war in Minnesota. This is not hyperbole. This is what he posted on Thursday:

“The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants. There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back. You have been robbed, and abandoned by your State Government. Your Governor is an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved. He just wants to get out of town with as much as he can steal, and then, lead a quiet life. The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue. Governor Tim Walz, and Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, must immediately ask for Federal help — and leave the rest to us! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Doubtless, defenders and apologists for the fascist in the White House will claim that when he writes “fight” he really means “vote,” that he is merely using typical exaggeration to encourage Minnesota voters to kick Democrats out of congressional office and reject Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan for Senate and Amy Klobuchar for governor next month.

If so, rubbish. Trump knows Republicans are losing and he is taking action accordingly. Remember Jan. 6, 2021? That dreadful day, speaking to his supporters outside the White House, Trump told the mob to “fight like hell” to block certification of his conclusive defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Nine deaths were linked to the riot that followed. Trump already has blood on his hands.

That concerned a presidential election. He has form when it comes to midterms too.

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/10/mayor-zohran-kwame-mamdani-releases-statement-on-ice-shooting-

Office of the Mayor
News
Contact the Mayor
News

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani Releases Statement on ICE Shooting

October 8, 2026

NEW YORK – Today, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani released the following statement after a New Yorker was shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent:

This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds. We believe the child was physically unharmed.

This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation. I have called the President; when we speak I will demand that he ends all ICE enforcement actions in our city. I will not stand by while ICE agents terrorize our communities.

Our thoughts are with the injured New Yorker and his family tonight. We are praying for his recovery. Get ICE out of our neighborhoods. Get ICE out of our hospitals. Get ICE off our streets. Get ICE away from our children.

Abolish ICE.

Media Contact

pressoffice@cityhall.nyc.gov

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/10/transcript--mayor-mamdani-holds-press-conference-on-ice-shooting

News

Transcript: Mayor Mamdani Holds Press Conference on Ice Shooting in Marble Hill

October 8, 2026

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani: Good evening, everyone. Around 4 p.m. this afternoon, a New Yorker was shot by ICE agents in Marble Hill. Many of the facts surrounding this shooting are still unclear, but here's what we know. ICE agents surrounded the man's vehicle before opening fire. They wore construction vests and masks that concealed their faces. There was no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents.

School had just gotten out. The street was crowded with families and children. When ICE agents opened fire, a 5-year-old child — a 5-year-old child — was in the back seat of the car. Thank God that child is physically unharmed.

For the past two hours, I have been on the phone with President Trump and Secretary Mullin negotiating the release of the man ICE agents shot. Those negotiations were unsuccessful. Just moments ago, ICE put the man in an unmarked vehicle and whisked him away.

Let me say this plainly: What happened today was an outrage. Tonight, a 5-year-old child sits traumatized and terrified. Tonight, millions of our neighbors are wondering whether they will be safe on our streets, in our schools, at their work sites. Tonight, New Yorkers across the five boroughs are asking whether their civil liberties will be respected, whether law and order is supposed to look like a man carrying a long gun, wearing a mask.

We know that ICE is rotten to its core. Today's shooting is only further devastating confirmation of what we have long known: that ICE operates with impunity, that they sow chaos and terror across our country, that they have killed far more of our neighbors than they could ever have claimed to save.

I also want to say something on a personal note. I stand here not just as the mayor of our city, but as someone who is proud to be an immigrant in our city. And I know that these kinds of raids, this kind of terrorizing of this city, leave the 3 million immigrants of this city asking if they are safe here, if they belong here, if this, too, can be their home.

We will not normalize ICE's viciousness. We will not accept its cruelty. We know, and I've said this directly, whether to the president or to the public, ICE undermines public safety. It makes us less safe.

New York City will not stand by while ICE agents shoot New Yorkers. And we will not back down from the demand that so many, including myself, have put forward time and again. This is an agency that must be abolished. Thank you.

With that, I am now going to turn it over to our Police Commissioner, Jessica Tisch.

Police Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch: Thank you, sir. I'm here to brief you on an incident that occurred earlier today involving ICE agents in Marble Hill, right behind me. The information I'm about to provide is preliminary, and it is subject to change.

At 4:04 p.m., the NYPD received two 911 calls reporting a person shot and shots fired in the vicinity of 2 Marble Hill Avenue. At the same time, a federal agent called 911 requesting the Fire Department and then asked for the NYPD.

According to our preliminary investigation, federal immigration agents were conducting a targeted enforcement operation in an effort to take an individual into immigration custody. At the time, that individual was inside a gray Honda CR-V with a 5-year-old boy whom we believe to be his son.

NYPD Argus cameras captured the victim backing into a parking spot in front of a fire hydrant right behind me. At that time, one plainclothes federal law enforcement officer approaches the driver's side window with his gun drawn. Another plainclothes officer also approaches the vehicle by the driver's side headlight. The vehicle then starts to move forward and goes out of camera view. The Argus cameras do not capture the discharge.

Based on evidence collected at the scene, we know that at least one ICE agent discharged seven rounds, striking the driver in the neck below his left ear.

Members of the NYPD's 50th Precinct Conditions Team were responding to an unrelated call nearby when they heard the report of shots fired, and they responded to that scene. When they arrived, they encountered several men in various forms of attire, including some in construction-style vests, face masks and at least one carrying a long gun.

Our officers also encountered the injured individual, handcuffed and seated on the ground. Our officers immediately placed him into an NYPD vehicle and rendered aid. They transported him to New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, where he arrived in stable condition. Our officers' actions were captured on body-worn camera.

I want to be clear: The NYPD had no involvement in the federal operation prior to the shooting, and no members of the NYPD were on scene at the time of the shooting.

Additional NYPD officers arrived and secured the scene for the purpose of preserving evidence. At least seven shell casings were recovered at the scene, along with the victim's vehicle, which had ballistic damage to the front windshield. The back window of the car was also shattered. That vehicle was positioned perpendicular to the road.

An ICE vehicle, which is a gray four-door sedan, had damage to the left front panel, and the lower panel was fully disconnected.

With respect to the child who was inside the vehicle: Pursuant to a wellness check, the NYPD located the child safe and in the care of a family member.

The individual who was shot has been identified as 28-year-old Oscar Belgal. He has two prior arrests in New York City: one for robbery in 2023, in which he pleaded guilty to fourth-degree grand larceny and received five years' probation, and one for criminal sale of a controlled substance in 2025, which is still pending.

At this time, federal agents have exercised their authority to take over the investigation. I will now turn it over to our attorney general.

Question: [Inaudible.]

Mayor Mamdani: There is no explanation for these tactics. There is no explanation for federal officers firing this many rounds into a car that has a 5-year-old in the car. There is no explanation.

We are standing here, so close to the site where this actually took place, and look at how many people live right here. This is a residential neighborhood. We are right here by a subway, and the pretext of ICE is, in their words, to keep this country safe. How is it keeping anyone safe to have, as you just heard from the police commissioner, individuals wearing construction vests and masks with long guns?

Residents have no idea if these are law enforcement agents or if they are simply attacking someone on the street. And when it comes to ICE, it begs the question: What's the difference? There is no explanation for this.

Question: [Inaudible.]

Mayor Mamdani: Now, I made clear to the president, to the secretary, our request that ICE agents leave the scene entirely, as well as the demand that ICE stop its enforcement actions in New York City. These actions are making the city less safe. They are making New Yorkers terrified.

You are hearing from New Yorkers right now — anguish, pain, anger — at the fact that here in this city, the world's city, immigrants have to wake up every morning and not know if they can live the lives that they should be able to live and help to build this city.

I'm proud to stand here alongside our public advocate, our attorney general, assembly members, City Council members, state senators and elected officials at all levels, united in the belief that there is no justification for what we have seen today. And we know that what we've seen today is but a microcosm of what ICE does on a daily basis across this country.

How can that be how we describe public safety? It can't be. And I've shared that with the president. I've shared that with the secretary.

This city wants ICE out. We want ICE out of our city, ICE out of our schools, ICE out of our hospitals, ICE out of our streets, ICE away from our kids. We want that because we want to keep the city safe. We do not need them to do so. All they do is terrorize this city.

###

Long Live the Black Radical Tradition: IN TRIBUTE TO AND CELEBRATION OF THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE, ART, AND LEGACY OF LEROI JONES/AMIRI BARAKA. Happy 92nd birthday Amiri!--Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 06:10:06 +0000

https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/01/amiri-baraka-1934-2013-legendary-and.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on January 11, 2014):

Saturday, January 11, 2014

AMIRI BARAKA, 1934-2014: LEGENDARY AND ICONIC WRITER, POET, CRITIC, PLAYWRIGHT, NOVELIST, PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL, TEACHER, AND REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVIST

All,

The death of Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) at the age of 79 on January 9, 2014 in his beloved Newark, New Jersey marks the passing of one of the greatest and most important American writers and thinkers of the past century and in my view the preeminent African American writer of his generation as well as the most consistently profound, innovative, and creatively influential of the entire post 1945 era. A charter member of an extraordinary generation of U.S. writers who were born between 1920-1940 (an innovative, dynamic, visionary, fiercely independent, highly contentious, and even openly raucous group that includes such pivotal post WW2 literary/cultural figures as James Baldwin, John A. Williams, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Truman Capote, Toni Cade Bambara, Larry Neal, Diane DiPrima, Charles Stevenson Wright, Al Young, Joan Didion, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Bob Kaufman, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, Robert Creeley, Susan Sontag, Edward Albee, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, and Clarence Major), Baraka (formerly known as Leroi Jones until 1968) was a truly revolutionary artist in every sense of the word. Blazing a fifty year trail of innovative literary triumphs in poetry, drama, fiction, music criticism and history, cultural and political essays, and social criticism that began formally with the publication of his first book of poetry Preface to A 20 Volume Suicide Note in 1961 Baraka was a also a consummate political organizer and activist who had a seminal impact on two generations of African American activists in a wide myriad of radical political movements that formally began in 1964 and lasted until his death. It is impossible in this limited space to properly comment on and explain just how protean and fundamentally groundbreaking so many of Amiri's stunning achievements in literature and cultural/social activism were or fairly assess the immense and invaluable intellectual and creative legacy he has left us all. As someone who was personally fortunate to have known and on a number of occasions worked with this figure in our contemporary art and politics for many years I was a personal witness to the kindness, generosity, warmth, humor (Amiri was a very funny individual), honesty, wicked sophisticated wit, and deep sincerity that Baraka so often embodied. It should also be noted that unlike far too many other intellectuals in general Baraka was also one of the very best DANCERS that I ever saw. To say that I and many, many other people throughout not only this country but the world (Amiri was a longtime and very enthusiastic global traveler) will miss this literary and cultural GIANT is a massive understament. Amiri was simply one of the those individuals whose extraordinary work and loving humanity constituted and represented the very best in the inspirational history of the powerful African American cultural, aesthetic, and political tradition(s) that informed everything that Baraka did and tried to do in a nearly six decade career. May Amiri rest in eternal peace and may his ongoing legacies continue to inspire, guide, and motivate us to fight for freedom, justice, and self determination in the arts, in our politics, and most importantly in our lives. As Baraka always taught and reminded us: A Luta Continua (The Struggle Continues)...What follows is an extensive textual and visual tribute to Baraka's art and life from many different archival sources, including from his own great body of work. Enjoy and spread the word...

Love and Struggle,

Kofi

AMIRI BARAKA

(b. October 7, 1934--d. January 9, 2014)

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tracyclayton/quotes-from-the-late-amiri-baraka

1. “A man is either free, or he is not. There cannot be an apprenticeship for freedom.”

—Home: Social Essays, 1966

2. “Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.”

—Interview with 3:AM Magazine, 2009

3. “There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you.”

—Home: Social Essays, 1966

4. “Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.”

—The Kindly Ones

5. “God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.”

—Home: Social Essays, 1966

6. “Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.”

—Black Art

7. “Since the rich eat more/ than anybody else/ It is reasonable to assume/ that they are more full of shit.”

—Class Gas

8. “Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.”
—Home: Social Essays, 1966

9. “There is no depth to education without art.”
—Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, 2009

10. “If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. {the confederacy} is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.”

11. “Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.”
--Via poetseers.org

12. “The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois lie which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is … political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.”
—Interview with Aaron Winslow via The Argotist Online

http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2009/10/tribute-to-life-and-work-of-amiri.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on October 7, 2009):

Poets.org
F

rom the Academy of American Poets

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/445

Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934. His father, Colt LeRoy Jones, was a postal supervisor; Anna Lois Jones, his mother, was a social worker. He attended Rutgers University for two years, then transferred to Howard University. He served in the Air Force from 1954 until 1957, then moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There he joined a loose circle of Greenwich Village artists, musicians, and writers. The following year he married Hettie Cohen and began co-editing the avant-garde literary magazine Yugen with her. That year he also founded Totem Press, which first published works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others.

He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. From 1961 to 1963 he was co-editor, with Diane Di Prima, of The Floating Bear, a literary newsletter. His increasing hostility toward and mistrust of white society was reflected in two plays, The Slave and The Toilet, both written in 1962. 1963 saw the publication of Blues People: Negro Music in White America, which he wrote, and The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, which he edited and introduced. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on March 24, 1964. The controversial play subsequently won an Obie Award (for "best off-Broadway play") and was made into a film.

In 1965, following the assassination of Malcolm X, Jones repudiated his former life and ended his marriage. He moved to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. The company, which produced plays that were often anti-white and intended for a black audience, dissolved in a few months. He moved back to Newark, and in 1967 he married African-American poet Sylvia Robinson (now known as Amina Baraka). That year he also founded the Spirit House Players, which produced, among other works, two of Baraka's plays against police brutality: Police and Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself.

In 1968, he co-edited Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing with Larry Neal and his play Home on the Range was performed as a benefit for the Black Panther party. That same year he became a Muslim, changing his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka. ("Imamu" means "spiritual leader.") He assumed leadership of his own black Muslim organization, Kawaida. From 1968 to 1975, Baraka was chairman of the Committee for Unified Newark, a black united front organization. In 1969 , his play Great Goodness of Life became part of the successful "Black Quartet" off-Broadway, and his epic historical play Slave Ship was widely reviewed. Baraka was a founder and chairman of the Congress of African People, a national Pan-Africanist organization with chapters in 15 cities, and he was one of the chief organizers of the National Black Political Convention, which convened in Gary, Indiana, in 1972 to organize a more unified political stance for African-Americans.

In 1974 Baraka adopted a Marxist Leninist philosophy and dropped the spiritual title "Imamu." In 1983, he and Amina Baraka edited Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and in 1987 they published The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984.

Amiri Baraka's numerous literary prizes and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston Hughes Award from The City College of New York, and a lifetime achievement award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He has taught poetry at the New School for Social Research in New York, literature at the University of Buffalo, and drama at Columbia University. He has also taught at San Francisco State University, Yale University and George Washington University. Since 1985 he has been a professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He is co-director, with his wife, of Kimako's Blues People, a community arts space. Amiri and Amina Baraka live in Newark, New Jersey.

Works by Amiri Baraka:

A Selected Bibliography:

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961

Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963

The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, 1963 (editor)

Dutchman and The Slave, drama, 1964

The System of Dante's Hell, novel, 1965

Home: Social Essays, 1965

A Black Mass, drama 1966

Tales, short stories 1967

The Baptism and The Toilet, drama, 1967

Black Magic, poems, 1969

Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969

In Our Terribleness, essays, 1970

Slave Ship, drama 1970

It's Nation Time, poems, 1970

Jello, play, 1970

Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965, 1971

Spirit Reach, poems, 1972

African Congress: A Documentary of the first Modern Pan-African Congress (editor), 1972

Hard Facts, poems, 1975

The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978

The Sidney Poet Heroical, drama, 1979

Poetry for the Advanced, 1979

reggae or not!, 1981

Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984

The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984; revised 2nd edition 1997

The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987

Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961- 1995

Wise, Why’s, Y’s, poems, 1995

Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.

Somebody Blew Up America, poem 2001

The Book of Monk, poems 2005

Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006

Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, essay, 2008

Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, essays, 2009

The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, 1963 (editor)

Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, 1968 (editor with Larry Neal)

Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, 1983 (editor with Amina Baraka)

Film Appearances

Motherland (film) (2009)
Ferlinghetti: A City Light (2008) .... Himself
The Black Candle (2008)
Corso: The Last Beat (2008)
Oscene (2007) .... Himself
Turn Me On (2007) (TV) .... Himself
Revolution '67 (2007) .... Himself
Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007)
Retour à Gorée (2007) .... Himself
The Pact (2006) .... Himself
The Ballad of Greenwich Village (2005) .... Himself
500 Years Later (2005) (voice) .... Himself
Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow (2005) .... Himself
Keeping Time: The Life, Music & Photography of Milt Hinton (2004) .... Himself
Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed (2004) .... Himself
Ralph Ellison: An American Journey (2002) .... Himself
Strange Fruit (2002) .... Himself
Piñero (2001) .... Himself
Bulworth (1998) .... Rastaman
Furious Flower: A Video Anthology of African American Poetry 1960-95, Volume II: Warriors (1998) .... Himself
Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement (1978) .... Himself
Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds (1978) .... Himself
One P.M. (1972)
Broderick, James F. Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2003.
Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980. PS3552.A583 Z57
Campbell, James. Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008.
Elam, Harry J., Jr. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997
Grandt, Jürgen E. Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004.
Johnson, Cedric. Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.
Joyce, Joyce A. Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005.
Lacey, Henry C. To raise, destroy, and create: the poetry, drama, and fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones). Troy, NY: Whitston Pub. Co., 1988 PS3552 .A583 Z75
Reilly, Charlie. ed. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.
Watts, Jerry G. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. NY: New York UP, 2001.

Kicked out of school (he never graduated), he headed back to Newark and joined the air force in 1954. And although he calls it "the worst thing I could have done," he also admits that the air force was "where I really got most of my education." A weatherman and a B-36 gunner, he was stationed in Puerto Rico and ended up the base librarian. Soon, the library became an informal classroom for "about eight, nine of us, black, white, Mexican. I would order The History of Western Music and each night there would be something else we would listen to, say, 'Well, what do they mean by counterpoint? Oh, that's what it is.'"

And books. "All kinds of books, man--we read Proust in there, all kinds of wild shit that I would never have read--Thomas Hardy, whatever. We'd read the whole New York Times bestseller list, which was BS like it is now, though I think it was a higher level of bull then. I remember this fellow saying, 'What's a Kafka?' I said I don't know what a Kafka is. Order it. Then we'd spend a week reading Kafka. We actually taught ourselves a great deal."

He was also writing poems and sending them to the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review, the Sewanee Review and the Hudson Review. "I would send them all out and they would come back quick. I should have saved those rejections."

In the end, though, Baraka was kicked out of the air force, too. He had too many books in his room--airmen were allowed to have only the Bible and one book--and among them was The Communist Manifesto. "Someone said I was a Communist. As it turned out, 40 years later, now it's true," says Baraka laughing.

Discharged from the service, he returned to Newark in 1957, "determined to go to New York." He got a job at the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street and moved into an apartment on East 3rd Street in the East Village, "$28 a month for three rooms, no heat. I remember my mother wept when she dropped me there because the place was so shabby." He married the writer and p t Hettie Cohen in 1958, and they began publishing Yugen, an underground literary magazine devoted to the work of other p t luminaries of the beat generation. (Baraka remarried after leaving that marriage; he now has seven children with the p t Amina Baraka).

By the early 1960s, he was reading at different places in the Village, and had published his first volume of p try, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, and his first works of jazz criticism (including Blues People and Black Music, two noted critical histories of blues and jazz). He knew the beat scene and other notable writers of the period: "I met [poe ] Jack Micheline down in the Village. Allen [Ginsberg] was in Paris. I sent him a letter on toilet paper asking was he for real. He sent me a letter back on better toilet paper saying that he was tired of being Allen Ginsberg. Allen and I were friends after that."

At the time, he was trying to free his poetry from the influence of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. "I decided I would consciously write another way. So I decided to put what I was writing about in my mind as a visible focus, but just write spontaneously off that image." He also let the line of his p try extend across the page. "Other p ts had a tendency to write a short, terse, well-defined kind of line," Baraka explains. "Once I let go of that preconception about the line, I found that the ideas that I wanted to talk about but couldn't, would come out, just flow out. I don't know if I consciously wanted to write fiction. It became that." The result was an extended, prosaic line of verse that prefigured the style of Dante's Hell and 6 Persons, which was written in 1973-1974.

While his work is admittedly autobiographical, Baraka says the books are not an extended memoir. "You take your life and talk about it any way that you can get into it. Some of it's fiction, some of it's like illusion, some of it's would-be, never-be and added-on-to. Some of it's literal. But it's fiction in the sense that it ain't happen like that. It's not linear. It's all kind of ways. Back and forth and up and down; reflections. The mind works like that if it's not put into the straitjacket of trying to recall literally what happened. Ultimately, what you try to get is what was the feeling of that period, what was the emotional charge of that period."

The language in these works is complex, allusive and fragmentary, like thought, but it is also emotional, capturing the raw vernacular of those times, and Baraka's characterizations of whites, homosexuals and Jews will no doubt offend all three groups. "People will jump on me about it," Baraka says. "I was going to make it politically correct, but looking at it, I thought, 'Well, that was then.' I certainly would not have described certain things that way now. In my wild mind that was the way I saw those things. I know some of it is very abrasive."

"I never wanted my fiction to be formal American literature because that's boring to me," Baraka says. "While this stuff might be more difficult, it's much more interesting to write." Surprisingly for such a pivotal literary figure, he has three unpublished novels, written since the 1970s, all in the same streaming, hallucinatory, machine-gun-paced syntax. Baraka shrugs. "The editor of 6 Persons said, 'I can't read that. Why don't you write something clear like Dante?' I said, 'What? A few years ago you told me Dante was unreadable.'"

Baraka has had a long and idiosyncratic publishing career. "My relationships with publishers haven't been great," he says. He declines to talk about his editors. His longest publishing relationship was with William Morrow, but he has also been published by Grove Press, Third World Press, Doubleday, Bantam and Thunder's Mouth Press. The Italian publisher Marsilio is currently publishing his poetry try and will publish a collection of essays on music later this year. He is represented by Sterling Lord Literistic.

"I'm going to try and get some books published by major publishers and continue to do my own publishing," Baraka says. "I've published a lot of my own works." The unpublished novels include Burning Mirror ("It will give you the mood of the late '70s and the political shenanigans going on"); Why Are You Saying This ("a book about the rise of the buppie, the Negro academic"); and Negrocity ("an overview of all the backwards Negroes I've ever known"). There is also a book of short stories called Tales of the Out and the Gone. And Third World Press is publishing a nonfiction work, Jesse Jackson and Black People, sometime this year.

"Wherever I speak," says Baraka, "I always urge that writers publish their own writing. Don't wait for these people [corporate publishers] to discover you, they're only going to try and turn you into them. Get your own galleries, get your own venues. You've got to have an alternative superstructure to this one, an alternative to this commercial culture."

Amiri Baraka Reading his Poetry with Music at the University of Pennslyvania in March 2013 with the Guthrie Ramsey, Jr. ensemble:

The masterful synthesis of words and music that allows the transformational merger of the lyrical and the powerful to reveal the truth...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgoUbn9nMlQ

Amiri Baraka reads "Somebody Blew Up America". (2009) Saxophone played by Rob Brown

VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUEu-pG1HWw

"Somebody Blew Up America" by Amiri Baraka with Rob Brown-saxophone, recorded live on February 21, 2009 at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy NY.

The poet icon and political activist Amiri Baraka performs with Rob Brown, an eloquent and versatile saxophonist with a deep knowledge of jazz, in a reading from his book "Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems.

This production is part of "Free Jazz at the Sanctuary," a 13-part series of performance videos featuring some of the world's most talented improvisers. Each hour-long show is available on DVD directly from Downtown Music Gallery (www.downtownmusicgallery.com). For more information on this series, visit www.JazzSanctuary.org

Amiri Baraka "Obama Poem" (2-21-2009):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPK9eH4EFTU

Amiri Baraka "Un Poco Loco" (2-21-2009):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mekNy7o3-JE

Amiri Baraka "Something in the Way of Things (In Town)" (2-21-2009):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKcPlbVHdy0

Amiri Baraka "Why's/Wise" (2-21-2009)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKfQNO66GPk

Def Poetry Jam TV appearance - Amiri Baraka - "Why is We Americans?":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ziRjhAgTO8

https://mainlypiano.com/other-reviews/leroi-jones-aka-amiri-baraka-blues-people-negro-music-in-white-america

Baraka's Website

Baraka's Artist Page on MainlyPiano

Blues People: Negro Music in White America
by LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka)
1999 / Harper Perennial

Reviewed by Steve Yip

Listen, folks. After watching the movie Sinners, which revolves primarily on the Delta Blues as a vital cultural and musical anchor of its story, it got me picking it up another old book, first read it at least 30-odd years ago -- Blues People: Negro Music in White America by the poet, playwright, and commentator LeRoi Jones, later to be known as Amiri Baraka. This book is something that should experience a revival, as in many ways, this is indeed an important exposition about how the blues and jazz developed as it aligned with the back-and-forth motion in how Black people into the American consciousness.

First published in 1963, Baraka explained by tracing the Black experience from enslavement to emancipation, to the appearance of the formerly enslaved Africans found in vast, disparate locales, plantations, and farms throughout the deep South into one people. This historical incubation -- found with the melding of Black people’s cultural heritage -- also appeared and manifested with music and “... the beginning of blues as one beginning of American Negroes...”

Of course, today we do not refer to the Afro-American people as Negroes, but that was the accepted terminology in those earlier days. What’s especially revealing was how Baraka locates the various historical nodal points in how the music emerged, developed and evolved from the bubbling cauldron of Reconstruction and later the Great Migration. Especially enlightening is how Baraka explains that blues was considered dirty and unwashed by an emerging middle class which sought legitimacy in the eyes of white America, and eventually it and its progeny like jazz and popular rhythm and blues, was able to firmly plant its roots as a foundational, cultural heritage in modern U.S. society.

From my perspective, this second reading of the 1963 edition was an exhilarating experience itself, which had sections and writing segments I found to be rather dense and requiring rereading; nevertheless, I found this book to be informed with scholarly precision and infused with some pointed and illuminated commentary throughout. Without going too deeply into it here, one may go to Wikipedia. It has a thoroughly mindblowing breakdown of the book chapter by chapter. And see what you think.

As an artist and social critic, Baraka has raised eyebrows, but for those who hold such retrograde views, they must admit to the monumental work represented by Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Yes, book blurbs serve as marketing tools, but there is no bullshit when Langston Hughes’ describes this book as, “...a must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America’s most popular music, Negro in origin--blues based--but now belonging to everybody.”

Reissued in 1999 with a new introduction to which Baraka wrote, "The music was the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection of Afro-American life ... That the music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music. And that both were expressions of and reflections of the people."

There should be a revival of interest in Blues People: Negro Music in White America, (post Sinners) especially in these dangerous times when forces from on high and about are actively extinguishing (among many other things) real history through book bans, assaults on African American and other ethnic studies on campuses, discussions on equity, inclusion and multi-culturalism, and critical thinking in higher education.

Blues People: Negro Music in White America is not just insightful, culturally impactful but invigorating. The 1999 edition is by Harper Perennial and can be found at your favorite neighborhood online book dealer. Take my word, this was an exciting read (and go see Sinners too).

July 25, 2025

https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2015/02/kofi-natambu-on-SOS-Poems-Amiri-Baraka.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on February 14, 2015):

Kofi Natambu On SOS: Poems 1961-2013 by Amiri Baraka, Grove Press, 2015

A Critical Review of a "Review”:

The White Supremacist Incompetence of New York Times "literary critic" Dwight Garner vs. the literary and cultural WORK and achievements of Amiri Baraka from 1961-2013

by Kofi Natambu
February 14, 2015
The Panopticon Review

“We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.”

―Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1956)

As U.S. History—social, cultural, economic, and political—notoriously and repeatedly reveals to us, the sustained relentless brutality and perversely willful ignorance and self serving arrogance of White Supremacy (forever masked in this country by the always handy and rhetorically vague euphemism called “racism") is simultaneously conscious, subconscious, and unconscious behavior no matter who is engaging in it. Moreover, in the living ideological and empirical context of a society and culture eyebrow deep in the vast and thoroughly rancid ocean of lies, distortions, aporias, evasions and denials intrinsic to the white supremacist intellectual mindset (and practice), the knee-jerk default position that one takes is nearly always one of an insistently dismissive and rank condescension toward the black subject/object/target of one’s middlebrow contempt and patronizing indifference. Thus instead of an intelligently considered and even minimally rational and focused critical analysis of the actual range and scope of the black object’s actual work and contributions we inevitably are subjected instead to an outrageously myopic reductionism and lazy simpleminded a priori rejection of the work in favor of a smugly self satisfied and mindless incompetence buttressed by an utterly defensive witlessness masquerading as “insight.” The result is the idiotic pseudo psychoanalytic bile and corny extraliterary judgment and moral posturing that Mr. Garner has conjured here instead of a mature, even minimally competent critical review of the actual “gift and achievements” of Amiri Baraka’s WORK over a half century. For example as Garner conveniently refuses to even acknowledge, let alone responsibly engage, regardless of what anyone thinks otherwise nearly every major writer or artist in history worth even a modicum of our attention and regard is necessarily and by definition a raft of internal and external contradictions and unresolved tensions that one may like or dislike, understand or are clueless about, identify with or disdain. But what pray tell does any of that have to do with the actual “gift and achievements” of their work? Far more relevant here is what does any of that has to do with a genuine critical assessment and engagement of this work? T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (just to name two of the endless number of famously white “mainstream" canonical examples one could cite) were both notoriously racist, sexist, and fascist minded snobs steeped in religious bigotry and secular hatreds whose highly contentious relationship to a wide array of people and cultures deeply rankles, upsets, offends, and horrifies many to this day (and largely for very good and substantive reasons) but in the FINAL ANALYSIS what does that have to do with determining whether or not Pound and Eliot were great poets and critics whose actual “gifts and achievements” were still extremely important and of immense artistic and intellectual value creatively to the theory and practice of poetry and literary expression whether one “liked” or “identified” with them or not.

In the case of Amiri Baraka my point is that even if Garner foolishly but honestly thought Baraka’s work overall was somehow unworthy of his or our collective attention he would still have to make the intellectual and analytical EFFORT at minimum to seriously and critically investigate and thus intelligently ascertain exactly what he thought Baraka’s work did and didn’t do in his literary career in order to share his opinions and ideas about the relative value (or lack thereof) of Baraka’s work for his criticism to have any kind of useful validity. But Garner does not come anywhere close to that basic level or standard of competency as a literary critic or even disinterested academic observer of Baraka’s fifty year oeurve. The reasons Garner utterly fails to do that is because he’s such a willfully smug, arrogant, condescending, and absurdly patronizing literary policeman who simply pretends he always already “knows” who and what Baraka is and isn’t as a writer and cultural force that he clearly thought/felt it was beneath his station or position (status?) to do what is REQUIRED of him to as a critic. In its place we get instead some silly infantile bullshit about Baraka’s “personality" (or what is absurdly construed by Garner to be Baraka’s personal psychology). Talk about rhetorical dishwater. It sounds to me like Garner has been drinking it! By dismissively reducing Baraka’s poetry to being “full of tantrums and sophistries” and Baraka himself to a mere “malcontent” who wore his “id on his sleeve” and was “tightly wound” and who “wanted to slice up "the white man" (could Garner possibly mean himself?) like a spiral ham” what we decidedly don’t get is a real literary critic capable of explicating and expressing ideas and opinions worth reading and (gasp!) actually thinking seriously about one way or the other. Instead we get the pompous adolescent blurtings of a junior/bush league pop psychologist. Anything else that Baraka has to offer as a major poet and intellectual Garner assures us without a hint of evidentiary information or analysis is nothing but “many, many deficiencies of coherence” that Garner couldn’t or didn’t want to grasp because it’s relatively unimportant or meaningless to him. Further as Baraka embraced a series of differing ideological positions we are told by Garner the presumptuous self proclaimed sage that Baraka's “political voice ran over his poetic one” (a falsely dichotomous theoretical split of political ideology and poetics if there ever was one) and that process in turn introduced some truly bad and contemptible things to emerge in his poetry. What an insufferable intellectual fraud! As Roland Barthes pointed out so eloquently in his early literary and critical theory opus Mythologies (1956) Garner is the very embodiment of that creepy species of narcissistic sophistry known as “blind and dumb criticism.” By way of a concluding sortie on this rampant tendency by far too many white American “critics” like Mr. Garner to blithely and unjustly condescend to, marginalize, and patronize various literary personas and “public personalities" rather than genuinely analyze and critique their actual literary production and output --and especially as it is pervasively and rather routinely applied to black writers in the United State--Barthes strikingly prescient views are still quite germane:

"Why do critics thus periodically proclaim their helplessness or their lack of understanding? It is certainly not out of modesty: no one is more at ease than one critic confessing that he understands nothing about existentialism; no one more ironic and therefore more self-assured than another admitting shamefacedly that he does not have the luck to have been initiated into the philosophy of the Extraordinary; and no one more soldier-like than a third pleading for poetic ineffability. All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind. One mimics silliness in order to make the public protest in one's favour, and thus carry it along advantageously from complicity in helplessness to complicity in intelligence. It is an operation well known to salons like Madame Verdurin's: 'I whose profession it is to be intelligent, understand nothing about it; now you wouldn't understand anything about it either; therefore, it can only be that you are as intelligent as I am…"

"...In fact, any reservation about culture means a terrorist position. To be a critic by profession and to proclaim that one understands nothing about existentialism or Marxism (for as it happens, it is these two philosophies particularly that one confesses to be unable to understand) is to elevate one’s blindness or dumbness to a universal rule of perception, and to reject from the world Marxism and existentialism: 'I don’t understand, therefore you are idiots.’ But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic? To understand, to enlighten, that is your profession, isn’t it? You can of course judge philosophy according to common sense; the trouble is that while 'common sense' and ‘feeling' understand nothing about philosophy, philosophy, on the other hand, understands them perfectly. You don't explain philosophers,but they explain you. You don't want to understand the play by Lefebvre the Marxist, but you can be sure that Lefebvre the Marxist understands your incomprehension perfectly well, and above all (for I believe you to be more wily than lacking in culture) the delightfully 'harmless' confession you make of it.”

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: IN TRIBUTE TO AND CELEBRATION OF THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE, ART, AND LEGACY OF LEROI JONES/AMIRI BARAKA (1934-2014). Happy 92nd birthday Amiri!

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 22:52:45 +0000

https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/01/amiri-baraka-1934-2013-legendary-and.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on January 11, 2014):

Saturday, January 11, 2014

AMIRI BARAKA, 1934-2014: LEGENDARY AND ICONIC WRITER, POET, CRITIC, PLAYWRIGHT, NOVELIST, PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL, TEACHER, AND REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVIST

PHOTO (L-R): John Coltrane and Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka in 1963

LEROI JONES IN 1964

All,

The death of Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) at the age of 79 on January 9, 2014 in his beloved Newark, New Jersey marks the passing of one of the greatest and most important American writers and thinkers of the past century and in my view the preeminent African American writer of his generation as well as the most consistently profound, innovative, and creatively influential of the entire post 1945 era. A charter member of an extraordinary generation of U.S. writers who were born between 1920-1940 (an innovative, dynamic, visionary, fiercely independent, highly contentious, and even openly raucous group that includes such pivotal post WW2 literary/cultural figures as James Baldwin, John A. Williams, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Truman Capote, Toni Cade Bambara, Larry Neal, Diane DiPrima, Charles Stevenson Wright, Al Young, Joan Didion, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Bob Kaufman, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, Robert Creeley, Susan Sontag, Edward Albee, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Quincy Troupe, and Clarence Major), Baraka (formerly known as Leroi Jones until 1968) was a truly revolutionary artist in every sense of the word. Blazing a fifty year trail of innovative literary triumphs in poetry, drama, fiction, music criticism and history, cultural and political essays, and social criticism that began formally with the publication of his first book of poetry Preface to A 20 Volume Suicide Note in 1961 Baraka was a also a consummate political organizer and activist who had a seminal impact on two generations of African American activists in a wide myriad of radical political movements that formally began in 1964 and lasted until his death. It is impossible in this limited space to properly comment on and explain just how protean and fundamentally groundbreaking so many of Amiri's stunning achievements in literature and cultural/social activism were or fairly assess the immense and invaluable intellectual and creative legacy he has left us all. As someone who was personally fortunate to have known and on a number of occasions worked with this figure in our contemporary art and politics for many years I was a personal witness to the kindness, generosity, warmth, humor (Amiri was a very funny individual), honesty, wicked sophisticated wit, and deep sincerity that Baraka so often embodied. It should also be noted that unlike far too many other intellectuals in general Baraka was also one of the very best DANCERS that I ever saw. To say that I and many, many other people throughout not only this country but the world (Amiri was a longtime and very enthusiastic global traveler) will miss this literary and cultural GIANT is a massive understament. Amiri was simply one of the those individuals whose extraordinary work and loving humanity constituted and represented the very best in the inspirational history of the powerful African American cultural, aesthetic, and political tradition(s) that informed everything that Baraka did and tried to do in a nearly six decade career. May Amiri rest in eternal peace and may his ongoing legacies continue to inspire, guide, and motivate us to fight for freedom, justice, and self determination in the arts, in our politics, and most importantly in our lives. As Baraka always taught and reminded us: A Luta Continua (The Struggle Continues)...What follows is an extensive textual and visual tribute to Baraka's art and life from many different archival sources, including from his own great body of work. Enjoy and spread the word...

Love and Struggle,

Kofi

https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2023/10/blues-people-60-years-later.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on October 10, 2023):

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

THE ONGOING IMPORTANCE OF BLUES PEOPLE 60 YEARS LATER
by Kofi Natambu

The Panopticon Review

SEPTEMBER 25, 2023 MARKED THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ORIGINAL PUBLICATION OF BLUES PEOPLE: NEGRO MUSIC IN WHITE AMERICA (whose subtitle was later changed in many subsequent editions to “The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed From It”). Written by the then 28 year old literary dynamo and artistic wunderkind Leroi Jones (whose name was changed to Amiri Baraka in 1968) and published by William Morrow, BLUES PEOPLE was lauded by many critics and general readers alike not only in this country but throughout the world as a truly revolutionary and deeply prescient and significant text that marked a major advance in both musical history and criticism, as well as cultural studies in the United States. As a result of this widespread interest and acclaim worldwide this now six decade text HAS NEVER BEEN OUT OF PRINT, an astonishing and deeply inspiring triumph. Thus in tribute to and appreciation of this book and its legendary author we offer many posts in this space that will critically examine and celebrate what this triumph has meant and has continued to mean to many generations of readers and lovers of art, philosophy, history, and literature throughout the world. ENJOY…

https://view.joomag.com/my-new-black-magazine-nyu.../0136805001445708478

https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-tribute-to-late-amiri-baraka-1934.html

THE MUSICAL LEGACY OF AMIRI BARAKA: The Modern Jazz Critic As Cultural Historian, Creative Artist, Social Theorist, And Philosophical Visionary

by Kofi Natambu
Black Renaissance Noire
Volume 14, Number 2
Fall, 2014

[This essay is dedicated to the memory and eternal presence of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1934-2014) who was not only a great artist, mentor, friend, colleague, and comrade but also--like he was for so many others around the world--a towering influence on my art and life]

"Leroi Jones has learned--and this has been very rare in jazz criticism--to write about music as an artist."
--Nat Hentoff, Jazz & Pop magazine, 1966

“ ... Negro music is essentially the expression of an attitude, or a collection of attitudes, about the world, and only secondarily an attitude about the way music is made...Usually the critic's commitment was first to his appreciation of the music rather than to his understanding of the attitude that produced it. This difference meant that the potential critic of Jazz had only to appreciate the music, or what he thought was the music, and that he did not need to understand or even be concerned with the attitudes which produced it...The major flaw in this approach to Negro music is that it strips the music too ingenuously of its social and cultural intent. It seeks to define Jazz as an art (or a folk art) that has come out of no intelligent body of socio-cultural philosophy…”
--Leroi Jones, "Jazz and the White Critic," Downbeat magazine, 1963; later reprinted in his book of critical essays and reviews Black Music (William Morrow, 1968)

“Jazz and the White Critic” was a challenge to jazz writers of all backgrounds to reckon with the lived experience of black Americans and to consider how this experience had been embedded in the notes, tones, and rhythms of the music.”
--John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

In the name of sheer historical accuracy and perhaps even ultimately a triumphant kind of poetic justice the following emphatic statement bears repeating as often as possible: For fifty years from 1963-2013 Amiri Baraka (also known as Leroi Jones) wrote and published the most profound, influential, and strikingly original body of musical criticism in the United States, as well as some of the most significant--and enduring--cultural and social criticism generally that this country has produced since 1945. This is especially true of his stunning and groundbreaking work in the musical genre of 'Modern Jazz' and his extensive, dynamic, and typically incisive examination of the music's rapid evolution since 1900 in both its visionary "avant garde" modes as well as its more traditional vernacular styles and expressions.

An essential aspect of Baraka’s critical writing on jazz however is also rooted in a deep consciousness and visceral understanding and love of the rural and urban blues/rhythm and blues traditions not only in formal and aesthetic terms but as a complex and historically cumulative social and cultural statement about the ongoing meaning(s) of the content of these musics in both their structural and lyrical dimensions. Thus an appreciation and respect for the ideological complexities and contexts of African American culture as an important economic, social, and political reality as well as an essentially protean artistic force is integral to fully engaging and grasping what Baraka is primarily focused on and concerned with in his writing about the music.

Thus it is not surprising that Baraka's first book about the music, originally entitled Blues People: Negro Music in White America became a seminal, widely acclaimed, and subsequently never out of print historical text. Published by the then 28-year-old writer in 1963, the book was also importantly subtitled in at least a few of its other many editions as "The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed From It." Disdained and even dismissed in some quarters by some haughty and self-important highbrow critics, both white and black, as being too steeped in what they perceived as a fundamentally reductive sociological emphasis in Baraka's analysis of the blues as art and history (a highly inaccurate and quite dubious line of argument echoed in a particularly patronizing and intellectually self serving manner by the celebrated African American novelist and cultural critic Ralph Ellison) Blues People clearly marked a major new turning point in not only the history of Jazz and blues criticism in the United States but in its perception and intellectual appreciation and understanding by music critics generally. Not surprisingly this new consciousness was also beginning to be reflected to some degree in its public reception by audiences.

Despite its ill-informed detractors Blues People also firmly established Baraka as a major intellectual and literary force to be reckoned with because he was not afraid of expressing a strong and independently assertive viewpoint alongside a persistently sharp critical analysis of what the music has meant to black Americans from the standpoint of not only individual citizens or artists but of the mass culture generally. He insisted on an interpretive POV that saw class relations as well as "race" in terms that established a clear hierarchy and division of attitudes and values that informed one's deep affinity for or relative indifference to the various forms and expressions of the blues as creative/stylistic form and artistic identity as well as a distinct and thus substantive and independent sensibility in the larger society as a whole. Consequently Baraka declared that the purveyors of the blues sensibility and its primary cultural progenitors were not only the artists and the intellectual connoisseurs of the form (i.e. critics, academicians, and scholars) but the so-called 'ordinary citizens' who loved and represented and embodied the art themselves (the actual "Blues People" of the book's title). Therein, Baraka insisted, lay the music's true power and ultimate potential as both a creative and social/philosophical force.

In that light it is important to consider that as the great poet Langston Hughes and many other critics and commentators pointed out when the book made its initial appearance that Blues People was in many ways the intellectual and critical culmination of a contentious historical debate raging then (and even to a great extent today) within Black America as well as the larger society over the cultural and thus political and ideological value and meaning(s) of the African American experience and the role of its various artistic forms and artists who through their creative work publicly represent and embody this cultural history. In Baraka's analysis the music serves as both a crucial narrative record (literally as well as on vinyl) of what black people have experienced and an ongoing emotional and psychological register of the impact and effects this experience has had on them and their larger spiritual, existential, and philosophical conception of themselves. As he puts it in his original introduction to the book in 1963:

"In other words I am saying that if the Negro in America, in all its permutations, is subjected to a socio-anthropological as well as musical scrutiny, something about the essential nature of the Negro's existence in this country ought to be revealed, as well as something about the essential nature of this country, i.e. society as a whole...And the point I want to make most evident here is that I cite the beginning of blues as one beginning of American Negroes. Or, let me say, the reaction and subsequent relation of the Negro's experience in this country in his English is one beginning of the Negro's conscious appearance on the American scene...When America became important enough to the African to be passed on, in those formal renditions, to the young, those renditions were in some kind of Afro-American language..."

Baraka also was deeply concerned with how and why these specific musical traditions, techniques, and innovations took the various forms and stylistic identities that they did from the dialectical standpoint of their creators' dynamic, and critically informed engagement with their aesthetic material. One of Baraka's major strengths as a critic is his emphasis always on the process of the creative act in the course of expressing ideas and emotions via the integral elements of music making. This is a major even central aspect of Baraka's writing as a music critic that he strongly maintained and greatly enhanced in all future critiques and celebrations of Jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues following the publication of Blues People.

In Black Music (William Morrow, 1968), his second book devoted to the extraordinary social history and cultural identity of this musical art, Baraka lays out what amounts to a very erudite and casually elegant book-length manifesto on the most advanced, radical, and innovative developments in modern Jazz during the culturally and politically tumultuous 1960s. A trenchant and mesmerizing collection of many of the finest theoretical essays, feature articles, and music reviews that he had written for various national magazines and journals from 1959-1967, Baraka not only critically interprets the revolutionary music of this fascinating historical period but discusses its myriad meanings and values from the direct viewpoint of the individual musicians themselves. What results is a series of riveting, complex, and always critically challenging portraits of these musicians as dedicated cultural workers and the often visionary perspectives that these artists embodied and conveyed to their audiences. Baraka especially draws the readers' attention to the largely black working class and sometimes even more economically challenging (i.e. poor) social and cultural milieu that so many of these musicians and their peers and colleagues lived, created, and performed in. In doing so he reminds us that many of the most profound, lasting, and useful modern art expressions in the United States (and elsewhere) are not merely or exclusively the products of the academic “Ivory Tower” and foundation grant institutions nor are they dependent on the often fickle largesse of wealthy patrons. In fact as Baraka amply demonstrates in his analysis the evidence everywhere of the deep desire and demand for aesthetic, economic, and political self determination among this intrepid generation of musicians, composers, and improvisers is one of the major principles animating their work and overall vision. One of many brilliant examples of this analytical focus can be found in Baraka's intricate, detailed, and powerful dissection of the general aesthetics and cultural values of such legendary and even iconic musicians, composers, and improvisors of the post 1945 modern music era as John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Wayne Shorter, Cecil Taylor, Joe Henderson, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Milford Graves, Don Pullen, Bobby Bradford, and Roy Haynes, among many others who emerged as a self consciously radical, innovative, visionary. and transformative force in the music since the late 1950s.

Dedicated to “John Coltrane, the heaviest spirit” Baraka's Black Music posed a tremendous intellectual and artistic challenge to an entire generation of artists, critics, and cultural/political activists (and I might add is still doing so some two generations and 45 years later!) to begin to seriously address and attempt to resolve many of the major structural and institutional problems and crises facing not only our creative artists in the realms of music, literature, dance, filmmaking, visual and media art, etc. but our larger communities as well. Toward that end the book provides an important ongoing subtextual narrative about the insidious political economy of the music business and its direct and indirect effects on the musicians themselves who not only have to withstand and tragically negotiate the oppressive and exploitive impositions of white supremacy/racism in all its guises but the even more comprehensive venality of corporate capitalism in the studios, clubs, theatres and general commercial venues where the music was being recorded and/or performed for various live audiences during an era when Jazz, despite its growing richness and vitality in a creative sense, especially was suffering greatly economically as a result of its clearly limited reception and appreciation by the larger society. This unfortunately also included the growing commercial interest in and support for pop, rhythm and blues, and rock musics (resulting in the increasing exclusion and marginalization of Jazz and blues) in the national black community.

Finally, the flagship essay of Black Music that opens the volume contains one of the most prescient, eloquent, historically significant, and intellectually honest essays ever written about the “Modern Jazz” dimension of African American music. Entitled "Jazz and the White Critic" the piece had originally appeared in Downbeat the largest national 'mainstream' Jazz magazine in the country in August, 1963 just before the appearance of his first book on the music Blues People later that year. What remains essential about this prophetic essay is its analytical insistence that the philosophical and cultural aspects of African American music like that of all major aesthetic traditions throughout the world is key to acquiring a genuine knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the art. As he states in his concluding paragraph:

“We take for granted the social and cultural milieu and philosophy that produced Mozart. As Western people the socio-cultural thinking of eighteenth-century Europe comes to us as a historical legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the twentieth-century West. The socio-cultural philosophy of the Negro in America (as a continuous historical phenomenon) is no less specific and no less important for any critical speculation about the music that came out of it...this is not a plea for narrow sociological analysis of Jazz, but rather that this music cannot be completely understood (in critical terms) without some attention to the attitudes which produced it. It is the philosophy of Negro music that is most important, and this philosophy is only partially the result of the sociological disposition of Negroes in America. There is, of course, much more to it than that.” (Italics mine)

The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (William Morrow, 1987)

The long awaited arrival of Amiri's third full volume of music criticism in 1987 published some twenty years after Black Music and twenty-five years after Blues People was not only well worth the wait but added still more brilliant wrinkles to his long-term critique of the music, its artists, and the larger social, economic, and political contexts that it existed and persisted in. Both a dynamic synthesis and extension of previous writing about its historical identity as well as an celebratory examination of its contemporary expressions, The Music is divided between a series of poems that center on Jazz and the blues by both Amiri and his wife, Amina Baraka, which takes up a third of the text, an extraordinary political play entitled The Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Musical by Amiri that uses both “avant-garde” as well as more traditional Jazz and blues elements, techniques, and styles in an updated and innovative operatic context. Most of the actors in the production are the musicians themselves who both play and sing their parts. Such important and highly accomplished 'avant' Jazz musicians of the post-1970 era as the tenor saxophonist David Murray, drummer and percussionist Steve McCall, violinist Leroy Jenkins, and the pianist/organist Amina Claudine Myers acted and played in this production.

The last third of the book features 26 virtuosic and typically incisive essays, reviews, liner notes, and feature articles by Baraka written for and published by various national magazines, journals, and newspapers in the 1975-1987 period as well as some new and important critical essays written specifically for the book. Covering everyone and everything from Miles Davis (in a masterful 1985 article for the New York Times) to the history of Jazz and other African American musics in Greenwich Village in NYC to a series of briliant book and music reviews of books and recordings about and by such major musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Woody Shaw, Cecil McBee, Gil Scott-Heron, Chico Freeman, Ricky Ford, and Craig Harris. There are also a scintillating collection of extremely informative, lyrically written, and politically astute theoretical and critical essays like "Where's the Music Going and Why?", "Jazz Writing: Survival in the Eighties", "The Phenomenon of Soul in African American Music". "Masters in Collaboration", "Blues, Poetry, and the New Music" "AfroPop", "The Class Struggle in Music" and "The Great Music Robbery." There is simply not enough space in this piece to do justice to the crackling intellectual firepower and truly impressive depth and scope of Baraka's writing here; suffice it to say for now that he (re)proves all over and once again exactly WHY he is the preeminent American music critic of the past half century by a very wide margin with virtually no real contenders in sight. Long out of print (and criminally never republished in paperback!) one MUST track down this 1987 hardcover classic and read what it says about a massive range of issues and concerns with respect to the music in not only aesthetic and ideological terms but from the equally profound standpoints of literature (and rhetoric), social theory, cultural history, and political analysis and journalism. One will not come away disappointed. If only the academic departments of 'American and African American Studies' (and all other so-called "ethnic", "humanities", and "cultural studies" programs generally) had professors, public intellectuals, and social activists of Baraka's caliber and clarity running them instead of the often pretentious, biased, and myopic fetishists of "language and culture" who too often ride herd in these fields in U.S. colleges and universities today, we would all be much better informed about the actual strength, beauty, and complex reality of the multiracial and multinational society that we all in fact inhabit. As Baraka makes clear in the essay "Blues, Poetry, and the New Music" from what is finally a GREAT book:

"Each generation adds to and is a witness to extended human experience, If it is honest it must say something new. But in a society that glorifies formalism, i.e. form over content, because content rooted in realistic understanding of that society must minimally be critical of it--the legitimately truthfully new is despised. Surfaces are shuffled , dresses are lengthened or shortened, hair is green or blond, but real change is opposed. The law keeps the order and the order is exploitive and oppressive! The new music reinforces the most valuable memories of a people but at the same time creates new forms, new modes of expression, to more precisely reflect contemporary experience!"

Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (University of California Press, 2009)

After an astonishing forty five years of endlessly writing, teaching, and lecturing about African American music all over the world it was an absolutely thrilling and inspiring surprise to find yet another extraordinary volume of music criticism by Amiri in the 21st century. Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (University of California Press, 2009) is an epic 411 page text of 84 essays, reviews, liner notes, articles, and precise literary portraits of and about musicians and their art over a fifty year period.. Taking on a huge canvas of critical themes and musical personalities Baraka carries off one can only be described as a penultimate triumph of the art and craft of music criticism at its highest possible level. In a stunning display and critical synthesis that includes an encyclopedic knowledge of the music, a razor sharp attention to the historical nuances of the music and how it it has stylistically evolved and mutated over the years, and finally a thoroughly independent theoretical and critical perspective on the music in aesthetic, historical, and social/cultural terms, Baraka compiled and summed up what constitutes a comprehensive philosophical treatise on Jazz and blues music in U.S.--and by extension the world-- over the past century.

In this quest Digging joyously and fastidiously examines the work, philosophy, craft, and vision of such GIANTS as John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, David Murray, Art Tatum, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Billie Holiday, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Andrew Cyrille, Barry Harris, James Moody, Jackie McLean, Sarah Vaughan, Stevie Wonder, Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Hopkins, Pharoah Sanders, Charles Tolliver, Odean Pope,John Hicks, Von Freeman, Jimmy Scott, and Reggie Workman (WHEW!). Baraka also writes with great insight, intelligence, and passion about such exciting and important emerging musicians and composers of the past two decades as Vijay Iyer, Rodney Kendrick, Ralph Peterson, Jon Jang, and Ravi Coltrane.

Finally Digging is an intense, wide ranging, and deeply philosophical and scholarly meditation on, and relentless excavation of, the multidimensional aspects of the music's varied diasporic genealogies, and a celebration of its ongoing presence and importance on both a national and global level. Amiri incorporates everything he has learned and experienced in the both the music and his life (and their endless interconnections). This synergy of the personal and aesthetic gives the book an organic unity and focus that shapes and informs the text as the essays strive to fuse an understanding of politics, history, ideology, and art with a larger vision of "what it all means." Confronting this complicated task is handled beautifully in such sage and critical essays as "The 'Blues Aesthetic' and the 'Black Aesthetic: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture ', "Jazz Criticism and Its Effects On the Music", "Black Music As A Force for Social Change", "Bopera Theory", "Jazz and the White Critic: Thirty Years Later" , "Newark's "Coast" and the Hidden Legacy of Urban Culture", "Blues People: Looking Both Ways", "Miles Later" and "Griot/Djali: Poetry, Music, History, Mesage". "Cosby and the Music", and "The American Popular Song: The Great American Song Book" among others. In other words NO ONE has written about American music with a wider, deeper, and more informed LOVE, UNDERSTANDING and KNOWLEDGE than Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones or what this music means to the artists who create it and the millions of blues people/citizens from all over the world who listen, dance, sing and live their lives to and with it. On this and much much more besides, Amiri has--as always-- the 'last word' (for now) on the subject:

"...So Digging means to present , perhaps arbitrarily, varied paradigms of this essentially Afro-American art. The common predicate, myself, the Digger. One who gets down, with the down, always looking above to see what is going out, and so check Digitaria, as the Dogon say, necessary if you are the fartherest Star, Serious. So this book is a microscope, a telescope, and being Black, a periscope. All to dig what is deeply serious. From a variety of places,,,the intention is to provide some theoretical and observed practice of the historical essence of what is clearly American Classical Music, no matter the various names it, and we, have been called. The sun is what keeps the planet alive, including the Music, like we say, the Soul of which is Black."

Kofi Natambu
Berkeley, California
April 9, 2014
(Paul Robeson's 116th birthday)

[NOTE: This essay also appears in the anthology Brilliant Flame: Amiri Baraka (Poetry, Plays & Politics For The People). Third World Press. 2018]

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLISHED MUSIC CRITICISM BY AMIRI BARAKA (aka Leroi Jones): 1963-2009:

Blues People: Negro Music in White America. by Leroi Jones. William Morrow, 1963

Black Music. by Leroi Jones. William Morrow and Company, 1968

The Music: Reflections On Jazz and Blues. by Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka. William Morrow and Company, 1987

Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music. by Amiri Baraka. University of California Press, 2009

https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2015/02/kofi-natambu-on-SOS-Poems-Amiri-Baraka.html

Kofi Natambu On SOS: Poems 1961-2013 by Amiri Baraka, Grove Press, 2015

A Critical Review of a "Review”:

The White Supremacist Incompetence of New York Times "literary critic" Dwight Garner vs. the literary and cultural WORK and achievements of Amiri Baraka from 1961-2013

by Kofi Natambu
February 14, 2015
The Panopticon Review

“We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.”

―Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1956)

Blues People
by Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka

William Morrow, 1963

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blues People: Negro Music in White America is a seminal study of Afro-American music (and culture generally) by Amiri Baraka, who published it as LeRoi Jones in 1963.[1] In Blues People Baraka explores the possibility that the history of black Americans can be traced through the evolution of their music. It is considered a classic work on jazz and blues music in American culture. The book documents the effects of jazz and blues on American culture, at musical, economic, and social levels. It chronicles the types of music dating back to the slaves up to the 1960s. Blues People argues that "negro music"—as Amiri Baraka calls it—appealed to and influenced new America. According to Baraka, music and melody is not the only way the gap between American culture and African-American culture was bridged. Music also helped spread values and customs through its media exposure. Blues People demonstrates the influence of African Americans and their culture on American culture and history. The book examines blues music as performance, as cultural expression, even in the face of its commodification. To Baraka, Blues People represented "everything [he] had carried for years, what [he] had to say, and [himself]". The book is deeply personal and chronicles what brought him to believe that blues was a personal history of his people in the United States. The resonance and desperation of this type of music is what compelled Baraka to learn about the history of blues music. He learned through his studies that the "Africanisms" is directly related to American culture, rather than being solely related to Black people. Baraka dedicates the book "to my parents ... the first Negroes I ever met".

The 1999 reprint begins with a reminiscence by the author, then aged 65, titled "Blues People: Looking Both Ways", in which he credits the poet and English teacher Sterling Brown with having inspired both him and his contemporary A. B. Spellman. Baraka does not here discuss the impact his book has had.

"African Slaves / American Slaves: Their Music"

Jazz is recognized as beginning around the turn of the 20th century, but is actually much older. Most people believe that its existence derived from African slavery, but it has native African-American roots. Blues music gave birth to Jazz, and both genres of music stem from the work songs of the first generation of African slaves in America.

As slave owners forbade their slaves to chant and sing their ritualistic music, in fear of a rebellion, the original African slaves were forced to change their work songs in the field. The lyrics of their songs changed as well, as the original African work songs did not suit their oppressed situation. Jones states that the first generation of these slaves, the native Africans, truly knew the struggle of being forced into submission and stripped of their religion, freedoms, and culture. The music that formed as a result became a combination of the original African work songs and references to slave culture. Negroes in the New World transformed their language to be a mix of their own language and their European masters', which included Negro-English, Negro-Spanish, Negro-French, and Negro-Portuguese, all of which can be observed in their songs.

Storytelling was the primary means of education within the slave community, and folk tales were a popular and useful means of passing down wisdom, virtues, and so on from the elders to the youth. These folk tales also became integrated into their music and American culture, and later began to appear in the lyrics of blues songs.

Expression of oneself, emotions, and beliefs was the purpose of the African work song. Instruments, dancing, culture, religion, and emotion were blended together to form this representative form of music. Adaptation, interpretation, and improvisation lay at the core of this American Negro music. The nature of slavery dictated the way African culture could be adapted and evolved. For example, drums were forbidden by many slave owners, for fear of its communicative ability to rally the spirits of the enslaved, and lead to aggression or rebellion. As a result, slaves used other percussive objects to create similar beats and tones.

As the music derived from their slave/field culture, shouts and hollers were incorporated into their work songs, and were later represented through an instrumental imitation of blues and jazz music. Based on this, Jones declares that "the only so-called popular music in this country of any real value is of African derivation."

"Afro-Christian Music and Religion"

Christianity was adopted by the Negro people before the efforts of missionaries and evangelists. The North American Negroes were not even allowed to practice or talk about their own religion that their parents taught them. Specifically, in the south, slaves were sometimes beaten or killed when they talked about conjuring up spirits or the devil. Negroes also held a high reverence to the gods of their conquerors. Since their masters ruled over their everyday lives, Negroes acknowledge that the conqueror's gods must be more powerful than the gods they were taught to worship through discreet traditions. Christianity was also attractive to the Negroes, because it was a point of commonality between the white and black men. Negroes were able to finally imitate something valuable from their white slave owners. By accepting Christianity, Negro men and women had to put away a lot of their everyday superstitious traditions and beliefs in lucky charms, roots, herbs, and symbolism in dreams. Bakari felt white captors or slave masters exposed Christianity to the slaves because they saw Christianity as justification for slavery. Christianity gave the slaves a philosophical resolution of freedom. Instead of wishing to go back to Africa, slaves were looking forward to their appointed peaceful paradise when they meet their savior. Although they had to endure the harshness of slavery, the joy of living a peaceful life forever in eternity meant a lot more for them. As a result of accepting Christianity, slave masters were also happy that their slaves were now bound to live by a high moral code of living in order that they might reach the promised land. A lot of the early Christian Negro church services greatly emphasized music. Call-and-response songs were typically found in African services. Through singing of praise and worships songs in church, Negroes were able to express pent up emotions. African church elders also banished certain songs they considered "secular" or "devil songs" (p. 48). They also banished the playing of violins and banjos. Churches also began sponsoring community activities such as barbecues, picnics, and concerts, which allowed the Negro people to interact with each other. As time went by, African churches were able to produce more liturgical leaders such as apostles, ushers, and deacons. After the slaves were emancipated, the church community that was built by Negro leaders began to disintegrate because many began to enjoy the freedom outside of the church. As a result, some began listening again to the "devil's music" that was banned in the church and secular music became more prevalent.

"Slave and Post-Slave"

The chapter "Slave and Post-Slave" mainly addresses Baraka's analysis of the cultural changes Negro Americans had to face through their liberation as slaves, and how the blues developed and transformed through this process. After years of being defined as property, the Negro had no place in the post-slave white society. They had to find their place both physically, as they looked for somewhere to settle, but also psychologically, as they reconstructed their self-identity and social structure. Their freedom gave them a new sense of autonomy, but also took away the structured order of life to which they were accustomed. Baraka believes the Civil War and the Emancipation served to create a separate meta-society among Negroes, separating the Negroes more effectively from their masters with the institution of Jim Crow laws and other social repressions. The Reconstruction period brought about liberty for the American Negro and an austere separation from the white ex-slave owners and the white society that surrounded them. Organizations such as the KKK, Pale Faces, and Men of Justice emerged, seeking to frighten Negroes into abandoning their newfound rights, and to some extent succeeding. The Negro leaders — or educated, professional or elite Negro Americas such as Booker T. Washington— and many of the laws that were made to separate races at the time, divided blacks into different groups. There were those who accepted the decree of "separate but equal" as the best way for the Negro to live peacefully in the white order, and those who were separate from white society. After the initial period following the Emancipation, songs that arose from the conditions of slavery created the idea of blues, including the sounds of "shouts, hollers, yells, spirituals, and ballits", mixed with the appropriation and deconstruction of white musical elements. These musical traditions were carried along the post-slavery Negro culture, but it had to adapt to their new structure and way of life, forming the blues that we recognize today.

"Primitive Blues and Primitive Jazz"

The chapter "Primitive Blues and Primitive Jazz" refers to Baraka's breakdown of the development of blues — and jazz as an instrumental diversion — as Negro music through the slave and especially post-slave eras, into the music that we would consider blues today (its standardized and popular form). After Emancipation Negroes had the leisure of being alone and thinking for themselves; however, the situation of self-reliance proposed social and cultural problems that they never encountered as slaves. Both instances were reflected in their music, as the subject music became more personal and touched on issues of wealth and hostility. The change among speech patterns, which began to resemble Americanized English, also created a development in blues as words had to be announced correctly and soundly. With Negro singers no longer being tied to the field, they had an opportunity to interact with more instruments; primitive or country blues was influenced by instruments, especially the guitar. Jazz occurs from the appropriation of this instrument and their divergent use by blacks, with elements like "riffs", which gave it a unique Negro or blues sound. In New Orleans blues was influenced by European musical elements, especially brass instruments and marching band music. Accordingly, the uptown Negroes, differentiated from the "Creoles" — blacks with French ancestry and culture, usually of a higher class — gave a more primitive, "jass" or "dirty" sound to this appropriated music; which gave blues and jazz a distinct sound. Creoles had to adapt to this sound once segregation placed them on the same level as all other freed black slaves. The fact that the Negro could never become white was a strength, providing a boundary between him and the white culture; creating music that was referenced by African, sub-cultural, and hermetic resources.

"Classic Blues"

Baraka starts the chapter with marking it as the period where classic blues and ragtime proliferated. The change from Baraka's idea of traditional blues to classic blues represented a new professional entertainment stage for African-American art. Prior to classical blues, traditional blues' functionality required no explicit rules, and therefore a method didn't exist. Classic blues added a structure that was not there before. It started becoming popular with the change in minstrel shows and circuses. Minstrel shows demonstrated recognition of the "Negro" as part of American popular culture, which though it always had been, was never formally recognized. It was now more formal. Minstrel shows, despite the overall slanderous nature towards African Americans, were able to aid in the creation of this new form. It included more instruments, vocals and dancing than the previous blues tradition. Blues artist like Bessie Smith in "Put it Right Here or Keep It Out There" were presenting an unspoken story to Americans who have not heard of or had ignored it. He makes the distinction between blues, which he ties to slavery, and ragtime, which he claims to have more European musical ties. Baraka notes that this more classic blues created more instrumental opportunities for African Americans, but on the other hand instruments such as the piano were the last to incorporate and had a much more free spirited melody than the other instruments or compared to ragtime. Even with these new sounds and structure, some classic blues icons remained out of the popular music scene.

"The City"

The "Negroes" were moving from the south to the cities for jobs, freedom and a chance to begin again. This, also known as a "human movement", made jazz and classical blues possible. They worked the hardest and got paid the least. Ford played an important role with their transition because it was one of the first companies to hire African Americans. They even created the first car that was available for purchase for African Americans. Blues first began as a "functional" music, only needed to communicate and encourage work in the fields, but soon emerged into something more. Blues music became entertaining. It morphed into what was called "the 'race' record", recordings of music targeted towards African Americans. Mamie Smith was the first African American to make a commercial recording in 1920. She replaced Sophie Tucker, a white singer who was unable to attend due to illness. After that, that "Jazz Age" began, otherwise known as the "age of recorded blues". Soon, African American musicians began being signed and selling thousands of copies. Their music began to spread all over. Companies even began hiring African Americans as talent scouts. To the surprise of many, African Americans became the new consumers in a predominantly white culture. Blues went from a small work sound to a nationwide phenomenon. Musicians in New York were very different from the ones in Chicago, St. Louis, Texas and New Orleans; the music of performers of the east had a ragtime style and was not as original, but eventually the real blues was absorbed in the east. People were only really able to hear the blues and real jazz in the lower-class "gutbucket" cabarets. World War I was a time where the Negroes became mainstream in American life. Negroes were welcomed into the services, in special black units. After World War I, there were race riots in America and Negroes started to think of the inequality as objective and "evil." Because of this, many groups were formed, such as Marcus Garvey's black nationalist organization, and also other groups that had already been around, like the NAACP regained popularity. Another type of blues music that came to the cities was called "boogie woogie", which was a blend of vocal blues and early guitar techniques, adapted for the piano. It was considered a music of rhythmic contrasts instead of melodic or harmonic variations. On weekends, Negroes would attend "blue light" parties. Each featured a few pianists, who would take turns playing while people would "grind". In 1929, the depression left over 14 million people unemployed and Negroes suffered most. This ruined the blues era; most night clubs and cabarets closed and the recording industry was destroyed. Events that shaped the present day American Negro included, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, and the migration to the cities.

"Enter the Middle Class"

"The movement, the growing feeling that developed among Negroes, was led and fattened by the growing black middle class".[2]

In Chapter 9, Baraka's focus is on the cause and effect of the black middle class in the North. Negroes who held positions, such as house servants, freedmen and church officials, were seen as having a more privileged status among Negroes of this time. These individuals embodied the bulk of the black middle class. Although Negroes attempted to salvage their culture in the North, it was impossible to be free of the influence of "white America", drowning out the Negroes' past. The black middle class both responded and reacted to this by believing their culture should be completely forgotten, trying to erase their past and culture completely to be able to fit in. This, in turn, contributed to the growing support for cutting off Southerners in order to have a life in America. This divided and separated blacks, physically and mentally. All in all, the black middle class' attempt to fit into America around them, caused them to conform their own black culture, to the white culture that surrounded them. Not only did they attempt to change music, but media such as paintings, drama and literature changed, as a result of this attempt to assimilate into the culture around them.

"Swing—From Verb to Noun"

In this chapter, Baraka illustrates the importance of Negro artist to be a "quality" black man instead of a mere "ordinary nigger". Novelists such as Charles Chesnutt, Otis Shackleford, Sutton Griggs, and Pauline Hopkins demonstrated the idea of social classes within the black race in literature, similar to that of the "novel of their models", the white middle class. The separation created within the group gave a voice to the house servant. As the country became more liberal, in the early 1920s, Negroes were becoming the predominant urban population in the North, and there was the emergence of the "New Negro". This was the catalyst for the beginning of the "Negro Renaissance". The Negro middle-class mindset changed from the idea of separation, which was the "slave mentality", into "race pride" and "race consciousness", and a sense that Negroes deserved equality. The "Harlem School" of writers strove to glorify black America as a real production force, comparable to white America. These writers included Carl Van Vechten, author of the novel Nigger Heaven. Since the Emancipation, the blacks' adaptation to American life had been based on a growing and developing understanding of the white mind. In the book, Baraka illustrates the growing separation, in New Orleans between the Creoles, gens de couleur, and mulattoes. This separation was encouraged as a way to emulate the white French culture of New Orleans. Repressive segregation laws forced the "light people" into relationships with the black culture and this began the merging of black rhythmic and vocal tradition with European dance and march music. The first jazzmen were from the white Creole tradition and also the darker blues tradition. The music was the first fully developed American experience of "classic" blues.

In the second half of this chapter, Baraka breaks down the similarities and differences between two jazz stars: Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke. "The incredible irony of the situation was that both stood in similar places in the superstructure of American society: Beiderbecke, because of the isolation any deviation from mass culture imposed upon its bearer; and Armstrong, because of the socio-historical estrangement of the Negro from the rest of America. Nevertheless, the music the two made was as dissimilar as is possible within jazz."[3] He goes on to draw a distinction between what he identifies as Beiderbecke's "white jazz" and Armstrong's jazz, which he sees as being "securely within the traditions of Afro-American music". Moreover, Baraka's broader critique of the place of Negro music in America is emphasized when he claims sarcastically, despite Beiderbecke's white jazz being essentially "antithetical" to Armstrong's, that "Afro-American music did not become a completely American expression until the white man could play it!"[4] Baraka then goes on to chart the historical development of Armstrong's music as it became influenced by his performances and recordings with the Hot Five. He notes that though previous jazz bands were focused on an aesthetic based on a flexible group improvisation, Armstrong's presence in the Hot Five changed the dynamic of play and composition. Instead of a cohesive "communal" unit, the other members followed Armstrong's lead and therefore, he claims, the music made by the Hot Five became "Louis Armstrong's music".[5]

Baraka goes on to write about the rise of the solo jazz artist and specifically Armstrong's influence on the tendencies and styles of jazz bands all over. His "brass music" was the predecessor of music featuring reed instruments that would follow. He writes about the bands playing in the 1920s and '30s and how the biggest and best of them were run and organized by predominately college-educated black men. These men worked for years to grow the music and integrate new waves of style as much as they could without sacrificing the elements that were so important to the identity of the music. Furthermore, Baraka writes about Duke Ellington's influence being similar in magnitude to Armstrong's but in a different way. He sees Ellington as perfecting the "orchestral" version of an expressive big band unit, while maintaining its jazz roots.

After this, much of the white middle-class culture adopted a taste for this new big band music that had the attitude and authenticity of the older black music but was modified, in part, to suit the modern symphony-going listener. This started transforming into the well-known swing music. When there became a market for this particular taste, white bands started trying to appropriate the style for the sake of performance and reaching broader audiences (a testament to the growing influence and significance of the Negro music movement). Unfortunately, Baraka points out, with the explosion in popularity, the industry for recording and producing music of this kind became somewhat monopolized by wealthy white record labels and producers. There was widespread discrimination against black performers, even after labels would pay good money for original scores written by someone else. This discrimination was evident too in the subsequent alienation of many Negro listeners, who became turned off by the appropriation and new mainstream success of what they felt and saw as their own music.

"The Blues Continuum"

Large jazz bands had begun to replace traditional blues, which had begun to move to the underground music scene. Southwestern "shouting" blues singers developed into a style called rhythm and blues, which was largely huge rhythm units smashing away behind screaming blues singers. The performance of the artists became just as important as the performance of the songs. Rhythm and blues, despite its growth in popularity, remained a "black" form of music that had not yet reached the level of commercialism where it would be popular in the white community. The more instrumental rhythm and blues use of large instruments complemented the traditional vocal style of classic blues. It however differed from traditional blues by having more erratic, louder percussion and brass sections to accompany the increased volume of the vocals. Rhythm and blues had developed into a style that integrated mainstream without being mainstream. With its rebellious style, rhythm and blues contrasted the mainstream "soft" nature of Swing with its loud percussion and brass sections, and because of its distinctive style remained a predominantly "black" form of music that catered to an African American audience. There was divide however between the middle class of African Americans, who had settled upon mainstream swing and the lower class, who still had a taste for traditional country blues. Over time, the mainstream sounds of swing became embedded so far into rhythm and blues that it became indistinguishable from its country blues roots and into a commercialized style.

"The Modern Scene"

As white Americans adopted styles of blues and adopted this new expression of music, jazz became the more accepted "American" music, which related to a broader audience and was accepted for commercial use. Through this evolution of blues into jazz and this idea that jazz could be more socially diverse and appeal to a broader range of Americans, blues started to become less appreciated while jazz represented the "true expression of an American which could be celebrated". Copying the oppressive ideas that segregated the people between white and black blues was devalued and the assimilation of both African Americans and their music into being considered "American culture" was next to impossible. As years went on there was a failure to see that the more popular mainstream sounds of swing and jazz and "white" wartime entertainment was a result of the black American tradition, blues created by the very people that America was trying so hard to oppress. In efforts to try to re-create their own sound once more and create their own culture of music, they began with their roots in blues and evolved their sounds of the past into a new sound, bebop.

AMIRI BARAKA
(b. October 7, 1934--d. January 9, 2014)

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tracyclayton/quotes-from-the-late-amiri-baraka

1. “A man is either free, or he is not. There cannot be an apprenticeship for freedom.”

—Home: Social Essays, 1966

2. “Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.”
—Interview with 3:AM Magazine, 2009

3. “There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you.”

—Home: Social Essays, 1966

4. “Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.”

—The Kindly Ones

5. “God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.”

—Home: Social Essays, 1966

6. “Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.”

—Black Art

7. “Since the rich eat more/ than anybody else/ It is reasonable to assume/ that they are more full of shit.”

—Class Gas

8. “Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.”
—Home: Social Essays, 1966

9. “There is no depth to education without art.”
—Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, 2009

10. “If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. (the confederacy) is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.”

11. “Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.”

Via poetseers.org

12. “The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois lie which says that good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is … political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.”
—Interview with Aaron Winslow via The Argotist Online

http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2009/10/tribute-to-life-and-work-of-amiri.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on October 7, 2009):

Poets.org

from the Academy of American Poets

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/445

Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934. His father, Colt LeRoy Jones, was a postal supervisor; Anna Lois Jones, his mother, was a social worker. He attended Rutgers University for two years, then transferred to Howard University. He served in the Air Force from 1954 until 1957, then moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There he joined a loose circle of Greenwich Village artists, musicians, and writers. The following year he married Hettie Cohen and began co-editing the avant-garde literary magazine Yugen with her. That year he also founded Totem Press, which first published works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others.

He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. From 1961 to 1963 he was co-editor, with Diane Di Prima, of The Floating Bear, a literary newsletter. His increasing hostility toward and mistrust of white society was reflected in two plays, The Slave and The Toilet, both written in 1962. 1963 saw the publication of Blues People: Negro Music in White America, which he wrote, and The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, which he edited and introduced. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on March 24, 1964. The controversial play subsequently won an Obie Award (for "best off-Broadway play") and was made into a film.

In 1965, following the assassination of Malcolm X, Jones repudiated his former life and ended his marriage. He moved to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. The company, which produced plays that were often anti-white and intended for a black audience, dissolved in a few months. He moved back to Newark, and in 1967 he married African-American poet Sylvia Robinson (now known as Amina Baraka). That year he also founded the Spirit House Players, which produced, among other works, two of Baraka's plays against police brutality: Police and Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself.

In 1968, he co-edited Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing with Larry Neal and his play Home on the Range was performed as a benefit for the Black Panther party. That same year he became a Muslim, changing his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka. ("Imamu" means "spiritual leader.") He assumed leadership of his own black Muslim organization, Kawaida. From 1968 to 1975, Baraka was chairman of the Committee for Unified Newark, a black united front organization. In 1969 , his play Great Goodness of Life became part of the successful "Black Quartet" off-Broadway, and his epic historical play Slave Ship was widely reviewed. Baraka was a founder and chairman of the Congress of African People, a national Pan-Africanist organization with chapters in 15 cities, and he was one of the chief organizers of the National Black Political Convention, which convened in Gary, Indiana, in 1972 to organize a more unified political stance for African-Americans.

In 1974 Baraka adopted a Marxist Leninist philosophy and dropped the spiritual title "Imamu." In 1983, he and Amina Baraka edited Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and in 1987 they published The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984.

Amiri Baraka's numerous literary prizes and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston Hughes Award from The City College of New York, and a lifetime achievement award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He has taught poetry at the New School for Social Research in New York, literature at the University of Buffalo, and drama at Columbia University. He has also taught at San Francisco State University, Yale University and George Washington University. Since 1985 he has been a professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He is co-director, with his wife, of Kimako's Blues People, a community arts space. Amiri and Amina Baraka live in Newark, New Jersey.

AMIRI BARAKA 1967

References:

New York: William Morrow & Company, 1963. ISBN 0-688-18474-X

Baraka, Amiri (1999). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Harper Perennial. p. 123. ISBN 978-0688184742.

Baraka (1999). Blues People. p. 154.Baraka (1999). Blues People. p. 155.

Baraka (1999). Blues People. p. 156.

William J. Harris on Baraka's "Blues People"
September 18, 2014

This talk marks the 50th anniversary of the influential volume's publication:

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZuKU5oXdH8

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

William J. Harris is an emeritus professor of American literature, African American literature, creative writing, and jazz studies. He taught at the University of Kansas, Pennsylvania State University, and Cornell University, among other universities. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of the acclaimed critical text on Amiri Baraka's work The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (University of Missouri Press, 1986).

https://www.aaihs.org/amiri-baraka-black-music-and-black-modernity/

Amiri Baraka, Black Music, and Black Modernity
by Wilton Schereka
November 24, 2020

African American Intellectual History Society
AAIHS

(Image of Amiri Baraka in San Francisco, Duncan C/Flickr).

I first encountered Amiri Baraka in Fred Moten’s In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. I know this is late in life to learn about such a remarkable figure, but my education up until then was not always broad, and my engagement with American poets up to that point was limited to poets mostly from the Harlem Renaissance. So, to have encountered Baraka then was revelatory for me. And now, we are gifted with this book by James Smethurst: Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity. It would be a mistake, though, to assume that this book is solely about the life of Baraka, rather, this book is also a biography of a place: Brick City. As an aside, I first heard about Brick City through the legendary Redman, so it is safe to say that my initial introductions to the place and the person were through musical referents. It is apt then, that I return to him through Smethurst in this musical way.

Amiri Baraka is undoubtedly one of the most central figures of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S as well as a key literary and cultural figure post World War II. Baraka’s politics and aesthetics, though ever evolving over his career, have solid consistencies throughout. These come in the form of his deep engagement with Black musical practices and formations. This is where James Smethurst’s Brick City Vanguard begins. “The first thing to say is that Amiri Baraka loved “the music”, which was jazz in the first place but also almost all forms of [B]lack music.” What this text asks us to consider is Baraka’s music writing, including writing on liner notes and a serious consideration of the popular Black musical form. To this end, I would situate this text as something that speaks to and against a tradition of anti-popular music writing, though I would argue anti-Black-popular music writing, fronted by the likes of Theodor Adorno who disparaged the work of jazz. Smethurst positions Baraka early on in relation to other thinkers as well, noting, “Unlike Stuart Hall, who famously claimed that he “doesn’t give a damn” about popular music except as a site or arena for political contestation, a place “where socialism might be constituted (a claim that I do not really believe, given Hall’s early fondness for jazz, especially the work of Miles Davis), Baraka would not have advanced such an argument.”

James Smethurst’s Brick City Vanguard is essential reading for anyone engaged in the life of Amiri Baraka or the Black Arts Movement. Further, anyone interested in the various ways in which music is thought and written about would find this text a most useful resource. This text is an attempt to open up, or at the very least, expound on a conversation about the ways in which we read Baraka’s work on art and music (influenced by Amina Baraka), and the changes over his career of his performance and literary writing. Smethurst also wants us to think about what music is, what music does, and how music does it, through Baraka’s writing. I think what is interesting is the site of the funeral as a place to bear witness to the reach and scope of the work Baraka made over his lifetime. It is here where we see the extent of his politics – union members, teachers, socialists, communists, musicians, poets, and artists. This is a testament to what constitutes the range of work Baraka influenced, but more importantly, this speaks to Baraka’s impossibly profound legacy. In the closing stanzas Smethurst notes

Looping back to Symphony Hall and what Amiri Baraka’s funeral might indicate about how to assess that career and contributions, one might recall again Baraka’s declaration that Newark embodied for him “a measure, a set of standards and life influencing principles.” Given his ability to sometimes talk about himself and his past as if he he were standing outside himself, passing judgement on his successes and failures, one could easily imagine him sitting in the audience of his own funeral, joking with the people onstage, looking around at the composition of the crowd, and concluding that his work had connected with the blues people of Newark and helped them survive and potentially even more forward.

This section exemplifies much of what Smethurst attempts to work through here. He explores the range of influences on Amiri Baraka and the absolute mass of people who he influenced as well. This book is as much about the man Amiri Baraka as it is about the place Brick City. It is an astute assessment of the importance of the relationship between Baraka and Newark, showing how and why this place held such a deep significance for Amiri and Amina Baraka. It is an attempt at showing exactly the kind of vitally important work that happens outside of the central art metropoles like Harlem.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Wilton Schereka is a PhD student in Africana Studies at Brown University. He is a graduate of the University of the Western Cape, where he obtained a Master of Arts in History, an Honors degree in English literature, a certificate in English and History education, and a Bachelor of Arts in English and History. His academic interests include black radical philosophy, the movement of philosophies between Africa's diasporas and the continent, aurality, sound, music, and visions of the postcolonial moment.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2013/07/26/205541225/black-history-meets-black-music-blues-people-at-50

A Blog Supreme

https://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2013/07/26/205541225/black-history-meets-black-music-blues-people-at-50
A Blog Supreme

Black History Meets Black Music: 'Blues People' At 50

by Eugene Holley, Jr.

July 26, 2013

NPR

PHOTO: Amiri Baraka leaves the polling place after voting in Newark, N.J., in 2010. Amiri's son, Ras Baraka, is currently running for mayor. Patti Sapone/Star Ledger/Corbis

The year 1963 saw the March on Washington, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers, the bombing of the Birmingham church that resulted in the deaths of four black girls and the passing of W.E.B. Du Bois. That same year, LeRoi Jones — a twentysomething, Newark, N.J.-born, African-American, Lower East Side-based Beat poet — published a book titled Blues People: a panoramic sociocultural history of African-American music. It was the first major book of its kind by a black author, now known as Amiri Baraka. In the 50 years since, it has never been out of print.

"The book was originally titled Blues: Black and White," says Baraka, now 78, by phone from Newark, while he was working on his son Ras Baraka's mayoral campaign. "But I changed it because I wanted to focus on the people that created the blues. And that was the real intent of that title: I wanted to focus on them — us — the creators of the blues, which is still, I think, the predominate music under all American music. It cannot be dismissed, even though you might give it to some pop singer, they change it around. But it will come out. It will be heard."

Blues People argues that in their art, Louis Armstrong, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and countless other black bards confronted the forces of racism, poverty and Jim Crow. This gave birth to work songs, blues, gospel, New Orleans jazz, its Chicago and Kansas City swing extensions, the bebop revolution (which in turn spawned the so-called cool and hard bop schools), and the then-emerging avant-garde of the late '50s and early '60s, characterized by the forward-thinking artistry of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor. For Baraka, jazz is "the most cosmopolitan of any Negro music, able to utilize almost any foreign influence within its broader spectrum" — a cultural achievement Baraka says was downplayed and ignored by Eurocentric whites.

"They have to do that to make themselves superior in some kind of way: that everything has come from Europe, which is not true," Baraka says. "And if you study, you'll see [the Africanisms] even in the way Americans talk; it's quite unlike English [from Great Britain]. And certainly the music has been one abiding register of Afro-American influence."

Baraka wrote that Blues People was a "theoretical endeavor" that "proposes more questions than it will answer" about how descendants of enslaved Africans created a new American musical genre and turned "Negroes" into "African Americans" in the process. That message still resonates deeply with many scholars, including Ingrid Monson, a professor of African-American music at Harvard University and author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa.

"I assign portions of this book in virtually every course I teach," Monson wrote in Blues People: Amiri Baraka As a Social Theorist, a speech she delivered in 2004, "to remind my students that cultural studies and critical race theory didn't begin in the academy, but in 20th-century African-American thought and intellectual practice from DuBois to Garvey, Locke, Ellington, Ellison and Baraka."

You've Got To Be Modernistic

Baraka was certainly not the first black writer to write about African-American music. But it was his modern stance, propelled by the momentum of the Civil Rights Era, that made his analysis unique.

"[Early works by black authors] primarily focused on the written tradition of African-American music, as part of the Western art music tradition," says University of Pennsylvania professor Guthrie Ramsey, author of Bud Powell: Black Genius, Black History and the Challenge of Bebop. "The goals of those books were to position black music within Western culture. There weren't many black writers who had the platforms like Baraka was developing at that time. He wrote that book from [a contemporary] African-American perspective. And that's what made it unique at that time.

"Blues People was out there not entirely by itself — Ralph Ellison had written some essays on jazz here and there and a few others," says fellow historian A.B. Spellman, author of Four Jazz Lives. "But Blues People certainly was the first one to take a comprehensive look at the music: where it came from, the people who made it and the culture that produced it. So in that sense it was a trailblazing book. And still remains a strong read today."

Baraka — as LeRoi Jones — came from a middle-class upbringing, including university studies at Rutgers, Columbia and Howard Universities. But he also served in the Air Force, married Jewish writer Hettie Cohen and published a critically acclaimed 1961 work, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, which established him as a noteworthy figure among the Beat Generation. It was the influence of the late poet Sterling Brown, who taught generations of Howard students — including Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and conservative economist Thomas Sowell — who gave Baraka the impulse to investigate the older folk traditions of African-American music.

It took me a decade to find that those records told a story: Every voice, every title is telling you the story of Afro-American history. I really latched onto that idea. And I went back and started listening to the blues.

Amiri Baraka

"I always liked jazz," Baraka says. "And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that. But when I went to Howard, the great Sterling Brown was a great influence on many of us. A.B. Spellman and I, Toni Morrison ... a lot of us sat up under Brown. And so, you can always tell that influence.

"We thought we knew so much about jazz. [Brown] said, 'Why don't you come on by my house, I'll show you some things.' We went by there, and he had the whole wall full of records, by chronology and genre, and he said to me, 'That's your history.' So it took me a decade to find that those records told a story: Every voice, every title is telling you the story of Afro-American history. I really latched on to that idea. And I went back and started listening to the blues."

"[Professor Brown] knew the music very well — particularly the great heroic bands like [Duke] Ellington, [Don] Redman, [Jimmie] Lunceford and [Count] Basie, and so forth," Spellman says. "And he was always very insistent that we know the music of the founders, and to know why their music endures, and what made that music. He was a terrific mind: a person with a good, clear and solidly based intellect."

Call And Response

Inspired by Brown, Baraka's Blues People spoke forcefully about the art black people produced — and the pain they endured in this country — and was well-received by black and white critics. Langston Hughes hailed it as "a must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music."

Not everyone was convinced. In his 1964 book of essays Shadow and Act, novelist Ralph Ellison wrote that "[t]he tremendous burden of sociology, which Jones would place upon this body of music, is enough to give even the blues the blues."

"He put my book down in his book," Baraka says, still stinging from Ellison's criticism five decades later. "I came with a sociological analysis of the blues that he didn't want to accept. He had a romantic kind of conception: The blues is just music that comes out of... But I was trying to find out why. [Sterling] Brown said if you study the actual music and the lyrics, they're talking about their lives. What do you think they're talking about? Some fantasy world? They're talking about their lives in America. And for Ralph not to understand that I think was a fundamental flaw in his understanding."

Today's scholars might take issue with the exact nature of Baraka's argument. Ingrid Monson's paper points out the author's "tendency toward social determinism [that] is particularly obvious in Baraka's discussion of class — which, to me, is where his argument is most undermined by essentialism. Here, middle-classness is the ultimate marker of cultural inauthenticity, because the black middle class, according to Baraka, dedicated itself to assimilation."

But Monson offers praise for the book in general. "Blues People is a brilliant and path-breaking book, not because all of its factual information is correct, or because all of its interpretive perspectives are unassailable, but because of the sheer audacity, scope and originality of its interpretive perspective," she wrote.

Becoming Baraka

Amiri Baraka in the 1970s. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Blues People outlined a black experience in sound, and it marked the beginning of LeRoi Jones' social and personal metamorphosis. His drama and fiction works grew increasingly centered on African-American themes. He moved from Manhattan's Lower East Side to predominantly black Harlem. He founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School in 1965 and, along with poet and critic Larry Neal, kick-started the Black Arts movement — a cultural arm of the Black Power movement. And, in 1968, Jones changed his name to Imamu Ameer Baraka, and later dropped Imamu (meaning "spiritual leader") and changed Ameer to Amiri. He would later move from Harlem back to his hometown of Newark, participate in the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Ind., and reject the narrow confines of cultural nationalism for Marxist-Leninist doctrines.

From the '70s to today, Baraka remains prolific, and has written an autobiography, essays and poetry. He's continued to publish books about music. But by far, Blues People remains his most influential work about music.

"You'd be hard-pressed to think about who has not been influenced by that book — anyone from Sterling Stuckey to Samuel Floyd, Ingrid Monson, Scott DeVeaux and myself," Guthrie Ramsey says, listing fellow scholars. "That book created a space in what I call the literary community theatre for all kinds of ruminations on black music." For Ingrid Monson, "[t]he speculative history of African-American music that [Baraka] presented in Blues People in 1963 successfully articulated a number of crucial issues that foreshadow recent work in cultural studies, post-structuralism, anthropology and ethnomusicology."

A.B. Spellman says a 2013 version of Blues People would naturally be different, but the focus on black experiences would remain. "A young writer trying to do a comprehensive book on African-American serious music would want to have a clear look at the sociopolitical environment of the music today," Spellman says. "It's a different one from the environment Blues People was written in, but no less exploitative; no less cynical, and it needs a different analysis. And you'd want to have a sense of pride, because African-American music has affected the culture of the world, and continues to do so. I would not attempt to be neutral."

As for the author, Baraka himself notes with satisfaction that the music and culture of "blues people" enjoys a wider influence in the 21st century than it did in 1963. "My own thinking has evolved," Baraka says. "You find Africanisms in American speech. You find an African influence on United States culture. There are all kinds of Africanisms in America, as you would expect, if you really thought about it. ... That whole thing is much broader; the influence is much broader than I first understood."

http://www.blackfreedomstudies.org/events/fall-2013/the-blues-people

The Blues People 50 Years Later
October 3, 2013

Inspired by Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), a generation of scholars in the field of Jazz and Blues music history and criticism was born, creating a legitimate space in the academy for the serious study of African American music. Joining Amiri Baraka in this conversation-- reflecting on the years between Baraka’s Blues People and his Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Music -- will be two major scholars in this field: Ingrid Monson and John Szwed.

Fifty years ago Blues People was the first book-length history written by an African American that addressed the social, musical, economic, and cultural influences of the blues and jazz on American history. His approach to music criticism was different from anything else that existed when he first began writing in the 1950s and 60s, partly because he was the only black writer in a field of white critics. Furthermore, he was not simply describing the music, but he was also fashioning a type of prose writing that was itself an artistic performance about music.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka is one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers. With the beginning of Black Civil Rights Movements during the sixties, Baraka explored the anger of African-Americans and used his writings as a weapon against racism. Also, he advocated scientific socialism with his revolutionary inclined poems and aimed at creating aesthetic through them. Amiri Baraka’s writing career spans over nearly fifty years and has mostly focused on the subjects of Black Liberation and White Racism. He is counted among the few influential political activists who have spent most of their lifetime fighting for the rights of African-Americans.

Ingrid Monson
Harvard University

Dr. Ingrid Monson is the Quincy Jones Professor of Jazz at Harvard and the author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call out to Jazz and Africa. She has a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Musicology from NYU, and a B.M. from New England Conservatory. Professor Monson won the Sonneck Society's 1998 Irving Lowens Prize for the best book in American music for her 1996 Saying Something, Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. She was also a founding member of the nationally known Klezmer Conservatory Band, and plays trumpet with jazz and salsa bands. She is working on a book on the music of the African Diaspora.

John Szwed
Columbia University

Dr. John Szwed is the Director of Jazz Studies at Columbia where he is also Professor of Music and Jazz Studies and the author of Jazz 101. Dr. Szwed’s publications range from anthropological studies of Newfoundland and the West Indies to record liner notes and jazz journalism. Before he joined Columbia, Szwed taught Anthropology, African American Studies, and Film Studies for many years at Yale University, and also received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. He is President of the non-profit music production company Brilliant Corners, which is based in New York City.

Video Recording:
https://vimeo.com/107619665

Inspired by Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), a generation of scholars in the field of Jazz and Blues music history and criticism was born, creating a legitimate space in the academy for the serious study of African American music. Joining Amiri Baraka in this conversation-- reflecting on the years between Baraka’s Blues People and his Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Music -- will be two major scholars in this field: Ingrid Monson and John Szwed.

Fifty years ago Blues People was the first book-length history written by an African American that addressed the social, musical, economic, and cultural influences of the blues and jazz on American history. His approach to music criticism was different from anything else that existed when he first began writing in the 1950s and 60s, partly because he was the only black writer in a field of white critics. Furthermore, he was not simply describing the music, but he was also fashioning a type of prose writing that was itself an artistic performance about music.

AMIRI BARAKA AT HOME IN HARLEM, 1966

Works by Amiri Baraka: A Selected Bibliography

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963
The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, 1963 (editor)
Dutchman and The Slave, drama, 1964
The System of Dante's Hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass, drama 1966
Tales, short stories 1967
The Baptism and The Toilet, drama, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
In Our Terribleness, essays, 1970
Slave Ship, drama 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Jello, play, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Spirit Reach, poems, 1972
African Congress: A Documentary of the first Modern Pan-African Congress (editor), 1972
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
The Sidney Poet Heroical, drama, 1979
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984; revised 2nd edition 1997
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961- 1995
Wise, Why’s, Y’s, poems, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, poem 2001
The Book of Monk, poems 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, essay, 2008
Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, essays, 2009
The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, 1963 (editor)
Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, 1968 (editor with Larry Neal)
Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, 1983 (editor with Amina Baraka)

Film Appearances

Motherland (film) (2009)
Ferlinghetti: A City Light (2008) .... Himself
The Black Candle (2008)
Corso: The Last Beat (2008)
Oscene (2007) .... Himself
Turn Me On (2007) (TV) .... Himself
Revolution '67 (2007) .... Himself
Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007)
Retour à Gorée (2007) .... Himself
The Pact (2006) .... Himself
The Ballad of Greenwich Village (2005) .... Himself
500 Years Later (2005) (voice) .... Himself
Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow (2005) .... Himself
Keeping Time: The Life, Music & Photography of Milt Hinton (2004) .... Himself
Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed (2004) .... Himself
Ralph Ellison: An American Journey (2002) .... Himself
Strange Fruit (2002) .... Himself
Piñero (2001) .... Himself
Bulworth (1998) .... Rastaman
Furious Flower: A Video Anthology of African American Poetry 1960-95, Volume II: Warriors (1998) .... Himself
Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement (1978) .... Himself
Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds (1978) .... Himself
One P.M. (1972)

Selected Bibliography 1980-Present (Books on the work of Amiri Baraka)

Broderick, James F. Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2003.

Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980. PS3552.A583 Z57

Campbell, James. Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008.

Elam, Harry J., Jr. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.

Grandt, Jürgen E. Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004.

Johnson, Cedric. Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.

Joyce, Joyce A. Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005.

Lacey, Henry C. To raise, destroy, and create: the poetry, drama, and fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones). Troy, NY: Whitston Pub. Co., 1988 PS3552 .A583 Z75

Reilly, Charlie. ed. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.

Watts, Jerry G. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. NY: New York UP, 2001.

http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2009/10/tribute-to-life-and-work-of-amiri.html

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/arts/index.ssf/2009/10/amiri_baraka_turns_75.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on October 7, 2009):

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

A Tribute to the Life and Work of Amiri Baraka on his 75th Birthday

"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is. "

--Amiri Baraka

All,

Today, October 7, 2009, marks the 75th birthday of one of the most important, influential, and creatively innovative writers and critics in U.S. history and one of the most significant African American artists and intellectuals of the past century. Highly gifted and creatively proficient in many different genres of literature--poetry, playwriting, cultural criticism, the essay, fiction, music and literary theory, history, and criticism, as well as journalism Baraka is also a consummate community organizer and political/cultural activist, theoretician, and strategist who has founded and/or been an integral part of many different social, cultural, and political organizations and is widely considered the leading force behind the legendary Black Arts Movement (BAM), a national cultural phenomenon that revolutionized American writing and cultural expression in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Amiri is the legendary and prolific author of over 30 books (!), an esteemed member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a past winner of the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Award, and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. Baraka also taught literature, music history, cultural history, politics, and African American Studies for over 30 years at State University of New York--Stony Brook, Columbia, Yale, and Georgetown universities. His voluminous body of work consists of many essays, short fiction, a novel, cultural criticism, political analysis, an acclaimed editor of numerous literary and cultural anthologies, and music history and criticism as well as twenty five plays, and literally hundreds of extraordinary poems. After nearly five decades of intense and committed work Amiri Baraka is a modern literary giant with a global following and a living icon of the various Black Liberation Movements of the past half century.

In celebration of a life and career that has had (and continues to have) a tremendous impact and influence on many writers, artists, and politically engaged intellectuals throughout the world the following articles, essays, poems, fiction, excerpts from plays, and social commentary by Baraka and other writers and activists are offered in tribute to a great artist and compassionate, dedicated human being who has always made a concrete difference in terms of not only living in the world but most importantly changing it. These offerings are shared as an expression of our deep and heartfelt appreciation for Baraka's ongoing effort and stunning contributions. Enjoy...

Kofi

http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2009/10/tribute-to-life-and-work-of-amiri.html

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/arts/index.ssf/2009/10/amiri_baraka_turns_75.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on October 7, 2009):

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

A Tribute to the Life and Work of Amiri Baraka on his 75th Birthday

"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is. "

--Amiri Baraka

All,

Today, October 7, 2009, marks the 75th birthday of one of the most important, influential, and creatively innovative writers and critics in U.S. history and one of the most significant African American artists and intellectuals of the past century. Highly gifted and creatively proficient in many different genres of literature--poetry, playwriting, cultural criticism, the essay, fiction, music and literary theory, history, and criticism, as well as journalism Baraka is also a consummate community organizer and political/cultural activist, theoretician, and strategist who has founded and/or been an integral part of many different social, cultural, and political organizations and is widely considered the leading force behind the legendary Black Arts Movement (BAM), a national cultural phenomenon that revolutionized American writing and cultural expression in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Amiri is the legendary and prolific author of over 30 books (!), an esteemed member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a past winner of the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Award, and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. Baraka also taught literature, music history, cultural history, politics, and African American Studies for over 30 years at State University of New York--Stony Brook, Columbia, Yale, and Georgetown universities. His voluminous body of work consists of many essays, short fiction, a novel, cultural criticism, political analysis, an acclaimed editor of numerous literary and cultural anthologies, and music history and criticism as well as twenty five plays, and literally hundreds of extraordinary poems. After nearly five decades of intense and committed work Amiri Baraka is a modern literary giant with a global following and a living icon of the various Black Liberation Movements of the past half century.

In celebration of a life and career that has had (and continues to have) a tremendous impact and influence on many writers, artists, and politically engaged intellectuals throughout the world the following articles, essays, poems, fiction, excerpts from plays, and social commentary by Baraka and other writers and activists are offered in tribute to a great artist and compassionate, dedicated human being who has always made a concrete difference in terms of not only living in the world but most importantly changing it. These offerings are shared as an expression of our deep and heartfelt appreciation for Baraka's ongoing effort and stunning contributions. Enjoy...

Kofi

Works by Amiri Baraka: A Selected Bibliography:

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961

Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963

The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, 1963 (editor)

Dutchman and The Slave, drama, 1964

The System of Dante's Hell, novel, 1965

Home: Social Essays, 1965

A Black Mass, drama 1966

Tales, short stories 1967

The Baptism and The Toilet, drama, 1967

Black Magic, poems, 1969

Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969

In Our Terribleness, essays, 1970

Slave Ship, drama 1970

It's Nation Time, poems, 1970

Jello, play, 1970

Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965, 1971

Spirit Reach, poems, 1972

African Congress: A Documentary of the first Modern Pan-African Congress (editor), 1972

Hard Facts, poems, 1975

The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978

The Sidney Poet Heroical, drama, 1979

Poetry for the Advanced, 1979

reggae or not!, 1981

Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984

The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984; revised 2nd edition 1997

The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987

Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961- 1995

Wise, Why’s, Y’s, poems, 1995

Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.

Somebody Blew Up America, poem 2001

The Book of Monk, poems 2005

Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006

Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, essay, 2008

Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, essays, 2009

The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, 1963 (editor)

Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, 1968 (editor with Larry Neal)

Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, 1983 (editor with Amina Baraka)

Film Appearances

Motherland (film) (2009)
Ferlinghetti: A City Light (2008) .... Himself
The Black Candle (2008)
Corso: The Last Beat (2008)
Oscene (2007) .... Himself
Turn Me On (2007) (TV) .... Himself
Revolution '67 (2007) .... Himself
Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007)
Retour à Gorée (2007) .... Himself
The Pact (2006) .... Himself
The Ballad of Greenwich Village (2005) .... Himself
500 Years Later (2005) (voice) .... Himself
Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow (2005) .... Himself
Keeping Time: The Life, Music & Photography of Milt Hinton (2004) .... Himself
Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed (2004) .... Himself
Ralph Ellison: An American Journey (2002) .... Himself
Strange Fruit (2002) .... Himself
Piñero (2001) .... Himself
Bulworth (1998) .... Rastaman
Furious Flower: A Video Anthology of African American Poetry 1960-95, Volume II: Warriors (1998) .... Himself
Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement (1978) .... Himself
Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds (1978) .... Himself
One P.M. (1972)

Selected Bibliography 1980-Present (Books on the work of Amiri Baraka):

Broderick, James F. Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2003.

Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980. PS3552.A583 Z57

Campbell, James. Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008.

Elam, Harry J., Jr. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.

Grandt, Jürgen E. Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004.

Johnson, Cedric. Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.

Joyce, Joyce A. Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005.

Lacey, Henry C. To raise, destroy, and create: the poetry, drama, and fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones). Troy, NY: Whitston Pub. Co., 1988 PS3552 .A583 Z75

Reilly, Charlie. ed. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.

Watts, Jerry G. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. NY: New York UP, 2001.

http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2009/10/tribute-to-life-and-work-of-amiri.html

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/arts/index.ssf/2009/10/amiri_baraka_turns_75.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on October 7, 2009):

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

A Tribute to the Life and Work of Amiri Baraka on his 75th Birthda

"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is. "

--Amiri Baraka

All,

Today, October 7, 2009, marks the 75th birthday of one of the most important, influential, and creatively innovative writers and critics in U.S. history and one of the most significant African American artists and intellectuals of the past century. Highly gifted and creatively proficient in many different genres of literature--poetry, playwriting, cultural criticism, the essay, fiction, music and literary theory, history, and criticism, as well as journalism Baraka is also a consummate community organizer and political/cultural activist, theoretician, and strategist who has founded and/or been an integral part of many different social, cultural, and political organizations and is widely considered the leading force behind the legendary Black Arts Movement (BAM), a national cultural phenomenon that revolutionized American writing and cultural expression in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Amiri is the legendary and prolific author of over 30 books (!), an esteemed member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a past winner of the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Award, and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. Baraka also taught literature, music history, cultural history, politics, and African American Studies for over 30 years at State University of New York--Stony Brook, Columbia, Yale, and Georgetown universities. His voluminous body of work consists of many essays, short fiction, a novel, cultural criticism, political analysis, an acclaimed editor of numerous literary and cultural anthologies, and music history and criticism as well as twenty five plays, and literally hundreds of extraordinary poems. After nearly five decades of intense and committed work Amiri Baraka is a modern literary giant with a global following and a living icon of the various Black Liberation Movements of the past half century.

In celebration of a life and career that has had (and continues to have) a tremendous impact and influence on many writers, artists, and politically engaged intellectuals throughout the world the following articles, essays, poems, fiction, excerpts from plays, and social commentary by Baraka and other writers and activists are offered in tribute to a great artist and compassionate, dedicated human being who has always made a concrete difference in terms of not only living in the world but most importantly changing it. These offerings are shared as an expression of our deep and heartfelt appreciation for Baraka's ongoing effort and stunning contributions. Enjoy...

Kofi

Posted by Kofi Natambu at 11:13 AM

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 02:32:00 +0000

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF OSCAR BROWN, JR. (b. October 10, 1926--d. May 29, 2005)

Today, October 6, 2026 we feature the life, art, and legacy of the iconic and legendary musician, composer, songwriter, poet, playwright, singer, teacher, producer, and activist Oscar Brown, Jr. (b. October 10, 2026--d. May 29, 2005)--Part 1

https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2016/07/oscar-brown-jr-1926-2005-legendary_22.html

Saturday, July 2, 2016

Oscar Brown, Jr. (1926-2005): Legendary, iconic, and innovative composer, singer, songwriter, lyricist, playwright, actor, poet, ensemble leader, teacher, and political and cultural activist

SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU

SUMMER, 2016

VOLUME THREE NUMBER ONE

PHOTO: OSCAR BROWN, JR,

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/oscar-brown-jr-mn0000894827/biography

Oscar Brown, Jr.
(1926-2005)
Artist Biography by Jason Ankeny

OSCAR BROWN, JR.
(b. October 10, 1926--d. May 29, 2005)

ttps://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2016/07/oscar-brown-jr-1926-2005-legendary_22.html

Oscar Brown, Jr.—“But I Was Cool

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dheVr7Wdrro

“But I Was Cool"
Lyrics, Music Composition, and Recitation by Oscar Brown, Jr., 1960

I've always lived by this golden rule,

Whatever happens "don't blow your cool"

You've got to have nerves of steel

Never show folks what you honestly feel

I've lived my whole life this way

For example, take yesterday.

I breezed home happy

Brining her my pay

Her note read "so long sappy,

I have ran away."

I threw myself down across our empty bed.

And this is what I said: (a series of crying, moaning, and howling noises)

But I Was Cool.

So I one-for-the-road it

At an all night bar

Wound up so loaded

I tore up my car

The judge threw the book at me

And when I read his sentence there I said

But I Was Cool.

So I said she's the only one I have to thank

So I found her and pulled my gun and fired point blank

The shot whistled straight passed that woman's head

And killed my hound dog dead

But I Was Cool.

As they carried me away

I was overhead to say

Be cool, stay cool, keep cool

Play it cool

C-o-o-o-o-o-l.

Oscar Brown, Jr.
“Bid ‘Em In!”

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAVCBYNujTM

“Bid ‘Em In”

(Composition, lyrics, and vocal performance by Oscar Brown, Jr., 1960)

Bid 'em in! Bid 'em in! Get 'em in! That sun is hot and plenty bright. Let's get down to business and get home tonight. Bid 'em in! Auctioning slaves is a real high art. Bring that young gal, Roy. She's good for a start. Bid 'em in! Get 'em in! Now here's a real good buy only about 15. Her great grandmammy was a Dahomey queen. Just look at her face, she sure ain't homely. Like Sheba in the Bible, she's black but comely. Bid 'em in! Gonna start her at three. Can I hear three? Step up gents. Take a good look see. Cause I know you'll want her once you've seen her. She's young and ripe. Make a darn good breeder. Bid 'em in! She's good in the fields. She can sew and cook. Strip her down Roy, let the gentlemen look. She's full up front and ample behind. Examine her teeth if you've got a mind. Bid 'em in! Get 'em in! Here's a bid of three from a man who's thrifty. Three twenty five! Can I hear three fifty? Your money ain't earning you much in the banks. Turn her around Roy, let 'em look at her flanks. Bid 'em in! Three fifty's bid. I'm looking for four. At four hundred dollars she's a bargain sure. Four is the bid. Four fifty. Five! Five hundred dollars. Now look alive! Bid 'em in! Get 'em in! Don't mind them tears, that's one of her tricks. Five fifty's bid and who'll say six? She's healthy and strong and well equipped. Make a fine lady's maid when she's properly whipped. Bid 'em in! Six! Six fifty! Don't be slow. Seven is the bid. Gonna let her go. At seven she's going! Going! Gone! Pull her down Roy, bring the next one on. Bid 'em in! Get 'em in! Bid 'em in!

http://jazztimes.com/articles/25487-oscar-brown-jr

Oscar Brown Jr. (10.10.26 - 5.29.05)
by Sheila Jordan
March 2006
JazzTimes

The first time I heard Oscar Brown Jr. was an LP called Sin & Soul. I just liked the name, and I had sort of heard about it. It was very, very popular, and rightly so, because it was a great, great record. What I loved about the record is that the message was so strong. There were so many social issues going on. All of these songs were so ahead of their time, and I was used to hearing and singing the Cole Porters--which are great tunes, don't get me wrong--but Oscar Brown Jr. came out with this stuff and it was just mind-blowing to me. I said, "Oh, my God, this man is a genius."

Oscar Brown Jr.
PHOTO: Mitchell Seidel

What I loved about Oscar is that he never, ever sold out in any way. I think a long time ago, when that record first came out, [the industry] could have pushed him into another area or into another category because he was so good.

Around 1960, when Sin & Soul came out, I started to do "Dat Dere," which featured lyrics that Oscar wrote for his son; I had a daughter who was around the same age and was asking all the same questions. I first recorded "Dat Dere" for Blue Note in 1962, and to this very present day I perform it because it reminds me of my daughter when she was little.

I think Oscar Brown Jr. is one of the unsung heroes of music--of any kind of music. I'm just regretful that I didn't get to see more of him performing, but with my schedule and what was happening, all of sudden you get to be in your 70s. And the 1960s were just so busy, trying to make a living and raise my kids. But I tell you, that's one of my biggest disappointments in life, that I didn't get to meet Oscar and tell him what a major influence he had on me. He taught me that when you feel something, you have to be honest about how you feel; it's not whether you're going to make money or whether you are going to sell records. I got that from listening to Oscar Brown Jr. all those many years ago on Sin & Soul.

http://articles.latimes.com/2005/may/31/local/me-brown31

Obituaries

Oscar Brown Jr., 78; Portrayed Black Culture in Music, Poetry and Theater
by Jon Thurber
May 31, 2005
Times Staff Writer Los Angeles Times

Oscar Brown Jr., a singer and songwriter whose work reflected the humor and hard truths of the black experience in America, has died. He was 78.

Brown died of respiratory failure Sunday at St. Joseph's Hospital in Chicago, said his daughter, Maggie Brown. She said her father was admitted to the hospital May 5 with a bacterial infection and underwent extensive surgery May 16 to try to stem the infection, but his condition deteriorated rapidly.

The multitalented Brown was a poet, actor and activist as well as a musician. In a New York Times interview some years ago, he said he set out to "deliberately present the culture in which I'd grown up. I wanted to present a picture of black culture to anyone who could hear it."

And he did just that in his songs, plays and musicals, which offered a strong sociopolitical point of view.

Released in 1960, his first album, "Sin & Soul ... and Then Some" on Columbia, was a hit. A mosaic of poetic and musical images, the album included his lyrics for such popular jazz instrumentals as Nat Adderley's "Work Song," Bobby Timmons' soul jazz tune "Dat Dere" and Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue."

It also included the socially charged "Bid 'Em In," a vivid re-creation of an auctioneer's call at a female slave sale. The album is still considered a classic by critics and aficionados.

In his hometown of Chicago, Brown was known in the 1960s for his theatrical works that offered vivid impressions of urban life. In one instance, he helped quell gang violence in the city by employing members of the notorious Mighty Blackstone Rangers in the revue "Opportunity Please Knock." He also created the musical version of "Big Time Buck White," which starred Muhammad Ali and had a brief run on Broadway.

Other theatrical works created during that time included "Kicks & Co.," which was featured by host Dave Garroway on an entire segment of the "Today" show in what was in effect a backers' audition. The musical had a short run on Broadway.

In the early 1970s, Brown premiered a musical drama, "Slave Song," written in iambic pentameter and rhymed quatrains. Underwritten by Howard University, it had a short run in Washington, D.C.

Brown worked as an actor on such television shows as "Brewster Place," featuring Oprah Winfrey, and "Roc," starring Charles S. Dutton. Widely knowledgeable about jazz and blues, he was the host of two programs on music: "Jazz Scene USA" in 1962 and "From Jump Street: The Story of Black Music" on PBS in the 1980s.

His songwriting brought acclaim from critics and leading artists.

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry said Brown had "a startling genius for rendering sense and nonsense into acutely succinct and brilliant summaries of life as we live it."

Critic Nat Hentoff said, "Here, finally, is a performer and writer who is so authentically hip that he never overstates his authority."

But Brown's work may have been too hip and authoritative for the music business. His albums never found a broad crossover audience and by the mid-1970s he was without a music contract. His career had gained new interest in the 1990s after Rickie Lee Jones covered "Dat Dere." In 1994, he recorded his first album in almost 20 years, "Then and Now," for Weasel Disc records.

For much of Brown's career, critics lauded his work and lamented his lack of popular recognition.

"He was a very riveting performer who could write about contemporary issues with a lot of bite and wit," Hentoff told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday. "I was always surprised that he never got the acclaim he deserved."

Writing in The Times in 2002, critic Don Heckman offered similar thoughts: "Every time Oscar Brown Jr. shows up in Los Angeles to deliver one of his inspired performances, I'm mystified about why he does not receive wider recognition."

Music is my Life Politics My Mistress The Story of Oscar Brown Jr. Official Film by donnie l. betts

No Credits Productions LLC

December 16, 2020

VIDEO:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjNJvwDLM4E

The official view on Oscar Brown Jr. produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker donnie l. betts. A powerful and gripping documentary portrait of the remarkable artistry and life of Oscar Brown Jr. A playful and charismatic performer, Brown is also an acclaimed jazz lyricist who worked closely with Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone and collaborated with Max Roach and Bobby Timmons on some of the most memorable compositions of the hard bop era. Beyond his musical achievements, Brown also engaged in a parallel career as a lifelong political activist of tireless strength and unceasing moral stamina, and his entire life can be read as a parable of the civil rights and Black Power eras in the United States. His lyrics touching on every subject from human dignity and childhood wonder to marijuana and cockroaches, Brown emerges as a kind of Black Everyman.

This is the official site for Music Is My Life Politics My Mistress The Story of Oscar Brown Jr. produced, directed, and created by donnie l. betts. www.nocredit.com

www.musicismylife.info

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/30/AR2005053000996.html

Appreciation

A Singer Who Played It Cool & Kept the Heat On
by Richard Harrington
May 31, 2005
The Washington Post

Singer-songwriter Oscar Brown Jr. spun actor’s magic on Washington stages in the early '60s, transforming himself into the phantasmagoria of characters who inhabited his exquisite creations: the inquisitive child of "Dat Dere" and the tired junkman of "Rags and Old Iron"; the coldhearted slave auctioneer of "Bid 'Em In" and the black man demanding reparations in the proto-rap tune "Forty Acres and a Mule."

A quest for social justice underpinned the music of Oscar Brown Jr., who died Sunday at age 78.

He was the proud, loving father of "Brown Baby" and "Maggie," written for the son and daughter who'd grow up to perform with him; the sly sensualist who could conjure a waitress's charms in "Hazel's Hips" and hilariously celebrate having two girlfriends in "Living Double in a World of Trouble."

Brown's astonishing 1960 debut, "Sin & Soul," and his 1964 live disc, "Mr. Oscar Brown Jr. Goes to Washington," are monuments to socially conscious songwriting on a par with the best work of Curtis Mayfield and Gil Scott-Heron, who also wrote about the full panoply of black life -- joy, anger, love, frustration, humor -- and helped define Afrocentrism. Brown did it first, in a way that managed to be both entertaining and serious, melding soul, jazz and musical theater into a body of work that always deserved far more recognition than it got.

"I started out to be an Open Negro in the late '50s," Brown told me in 1992. "That meant that I wanted to reflect -- in my presentation and in what I wrote -- the things that I'd experienced, to be black, not incidentally but deliberately , culturally . I'd like to think I was in the wave [of Afrocentric artists]; which drop of water I turned out to be, I don't know."

Brown, who died in his home town of Chicago on Sunday at age 78, was an optimist -- and a realist, knowing that any social progress was hard-won. The first of his songs to be recorded, by gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, was "Brown Baby." Jackson sang it with quiet majesty, but when Brown recorded it later, it was a soft-spun lullaby of aspiration, not only for Oscar Brown III but for all black babies: "I want you to live by the justice code, I want you to walk down freedom's road / Brown baby, it makes me glad that you will have things I have never had / When out of men's hearts all the hate is hurled, you're gonna live in a better world."

He also captured the wondrous energy of childhood in "Maggie," gleefully recounting that "to bounce my baby on my knee / To see her smiling back at me / Makes living sweet as it can be." Brown ended the song insisting, "Who's Who may never know my name / And not much money can I claim / But I'm important just the same to Little Maggie."

In truth, Oscar Brown Jr. was important to a lot of people. An upcoming documentary about him is titled "Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress," and truth is, there was no division in the best of his work, including the horrifying "Bid 'Em In," in which Brown evoked the singsong call of an auctioneer selling off a female slave, often embodied onstage by Brown's wife and frequent singing partner, Jean Pace.

I'm looking for four. And $400, she's a bargain for sure

Four is the bid, 450, five; $500 now look alive

Bid 'em in; get 'em in. Don't mind them tears, that's one of her tricks

Five-fifty's the bid, and who'll say six?

She's healthy and strong and well-equipped

Make a fine lady's maid when she's properly whipped

The search for social justice that proved a continuing thread in Brown's work was hardly surprising -- his father was a lawyer and political activist. But in college, Brown immersed himself in poetry -- British bards Shakespeare, Keats and Shelley and the great black poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen -- as well as musical theater, from classic Broadway composers to the political cabaret of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. He'd also be influenced by the left-leaning folk revival of the late '50s and early '60s.

Brown was a family friend of fellow South Side resident Lorraine Hansberry, whose "Raisin in the Sun" had a pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago; Hansberry's husband owned a music publishing firm and was the one who brought "Brown Baby" to Jackson. A composer's demo for those sessions led to Brown being signed by Columbia, and early on he made a name for himself adding lyrics to jazz hits like Nat Adderley's "Work Song," Miles Davis's "All Blues," Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue" and Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer."

The writer drew from black culture for narratives like "Signifyin' Monkey" and "The Snake," crafted such civil rights anthems as "Opportunity Please Knock" and "We Insist! Freedom Now," a 1960 jazz suite written with Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, and voiced compassion for his community in "Brother, Where Are You?" and "Children Having Children." Brown's songs were recorded by the likes of Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Tony Bennett and Ricki Lee Jones, but no one ever did them better than their author.

One particular audience favorite found Brown wryly reporting on a series of romantic and financial setbacks, all the while insisting he maintained the upper hand:

I've always lived by this golden rule: Whatever happens, don't blow your cool

You've got to have nerves of steel, and never show folks how you honestly feel

I've lived my whole life this way. For example, take yesterday

I breezed home happy, bringing her my pay

Her note read, "So long, Sappy, I have run away"

I threw myself down across our empty bed, and this is what I said --

And here, Oscar Brown Jr. would break into the most pitiful dramatic sobbing, before delivering his coda:

But I was cool.

That he was.

https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/oscarbrownjr

Oscar Brown Jr.

Biography
Articles
News

As a performer, he acted his songs more than he sang them; as a songwriter, he drew as much from gospel, the blues and folk music as he did from jazz. He preferred to call himself an entertainer, although even that broad term didnotgo far enough: he saw his art as a way to celebrate African-American life and attack racism, and it was not always easy to tell where the entertainer ended and the activist began.

His song “Brown Baby,” recorded by Mahalia Jackson and others, was both a lullaby for his infant son and an anthem of racial pride. Other songs, like “Signifying Monkey” and “The Snake,” took their story lines from black folklore. The album, “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” for which Mr. Brown wrote lyrics to the drummer Max Roach's music, was one of the first jazz works to address the civil rights movement. His commitment to art as a tool for social change was most evident in the numerous stage shows he wrote and directed in his hometown Chicago.

Oscar Cicero Brown, Jr. made his earthly debut on October 10, 1926 at Chicago ’s Provident Hospital as the firstborn child of school teacher, Helen Lawrence and Oscar C. Brown, Sr., a prominent lawyer and real estate owner. Oscar was raised in a two-church house hold: his mother attended St. Edmond’s Episcopal Church, and his father was a member, and attorney for Pilgrim Baptist Church for over fifty years. Oscar Jr.’s verbal skills stood out early in his academic career as evidenced by thefact that he often took first-place in “elocution” contests. He attended Willard Elementary and Englewood High Schools, and by age 15, he had launched his professional career in Studs Terkel's children's radio series, called “ Secret City .” His father, however, encouraged him to pursue a college career and study law, with the hope that he would take over the family business.

As a result of two “double promotions” in elementary school, he was only sixteen years old when enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1943. After attending several colleges and universities, including Lincoln University (Pa.) and the University of Michigan, where he excelled in English composition, but failed everything else, it became clear that creative writing was his primary interest, rather than academic study or the business world.

In his twenties, he returned to work in radio, spending five years as the “world’s firstNegro newscaster,” for a Chicago program called “Negro Newsfront,” where he also managed to include a musical menu, as well as poetic works by Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. In addition to his media work, he continued to dabble in real estate, advertising, and public relations; but he soon turned to activism”both inside and outside electoral politics. One of his first jobs along these lines was as program director for the progressive United Packinghouse Workers union. Activism was part of his father’s legacy”Oscar Sr. had served at the helm of the Chicago NAACP, but had also been part of a nationalist effort to develop a 49 th state for African Americans. In 1948, Oscar ran for the Illinois legislature on the Progressive Party ticket, and for the U.S. Congress as a Republican in 1952”a party he conveniently selected in order to get on the ballot. Oscar was actually a member of the Communist Party from the time he was 20, to his resignation in 1956 at the age of 30, when he concluded that he was “just too black to be red.” From 1948 to 1950, Oscar played a key role in Richard Durham’s “Destination Freedom” Black Radio Days series. He then went on to serve two years in the Army, after which he began to pursue his hobby of composing songs by singing a little in local nightspots.

The turning point in his career came around 1960. The Brown family were neighbors of the award-winning playwright, Lorraine Hansberry’s family. When “A Raisin in the Sun” debuted in Chicago before it’s New York premier, Oscar met Hansberry ’s husband, Robert Nemiroff, who worked for a New York based music publishing company. Nemiroff in turn introduced Oscar’s music to New York , which led to a recording contract with Columbia records and the classic recording, “Sin and Soul,” the debut album that made Oscar Brown Jr. a national celebrity.

The Los Angeles Times described it as “a mosaic of poetic and musical images [with] lyrics for such popular jazz instrumentals as Nat Adderley's “Work Song,” Bobby Timmons' soul jazz tune “Dat Dere” and Mongo Santamaria's “Afro Blue”; as well as “the socially charged “Bid 'Em In,” a vivid re-creation of an auctioneer's call of a female slave sale; and the lullaby “Brown Baby,” written for his newborn son, and recorded by such giants as Mahalia Jackson, and Lena Horne.

Oscar went on to perform at such venues as the Village Vanguard, and tour with Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderley; composed the lyrics for the Davis classic, “All Blues,” and collaborated with Max Roach on the landmark civil rights composition, the “Freedom Now Suite.” His magnum opus came in 1961, with the production of “Kicks & Company,” directed by Hansberry, and co-produced by Nemiroff. Backer s’ auditions and fundraising activity reached a new level when Oscar Brown. Jr. made an unprecedented two hour appearance on the NBC’s “Today Show,” at the invitation of host Dave Garroway and subsequently raised over $400,000. OBJ was on his way, but sudden found it necessary to stage a “comeback” when the show “Kicks & Company” closed shortly after it previewed, in Chicago ’s McCormick Place in 1961. He didn’t ponder the circumstances but instead focused on appearances with jazz royalty earned him great critical acclaim from coast to coast.

His one man show, “Oscar Brown Jr. Entertains,” in London two years later, resulted in his being hailed: “a musical genius,” “the high priest of hip,” and “all the great ones rolled into one.” Before leaving for England , Brown hosted a television series “Jazz Scene USA,” taped in Los Angeles, where he met singer/dancer Jean Pace —ultimately to become his wife.

Oscar’s production of “Joy ‘66” brought the couple to Chicago , where within a year, they developed three more musicals entitled “Summer in the City,” “Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow [with Phil Cohran],” and “Opportunity Please Knock.” “Opportunity Please Knock” was produced in 1967 in conjunction with a youth gang known as the Blackstone Rangers, and gained national recognition when gang members appeared on the Smothers Brothers CBS television show. Their work with the gang resulted in thepair being invited in 1968 by newly elected Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary , Indiana,to conduct a summer project with young talent in that city. Among their “discoveries” were The Jackson Five, and actor/singer Avery Brooks.

Brown and Pace moved to San Francisco the following year where Oscar turned the comedy production “Big Time Buck White” into a musical, which ran successfully in the Bay area, before coming briefly to Broadway where it featured Muhammad Ali in the title role. Meanwhile, Brown and Pace had joined with Brazilian musicians Luiz Henrique and Sivuca in the production of “Joy 69,” which ran over a year in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago . The next decade found Oscar Brown Jr. as an artist-in-residence directing his works at Howard University in Washington , D.C. , Hunter College in New York and Malcolm X College in Chicago .

In the early 1970s, Brown premiered a musical drama in Washington, DC, that was underwritten by Howard University, entitled “Slave Song,” written in iambic pentameter and rhymed quatrains. By 1975, Brown had recorded 10 albums, and re-staged and starred in the hit production “Evolution of the Blues” in San Francisco .

Later that year, Oscar was featured in a (CBS) WBBM-TV special, “Oscar Brown is Back” in Town,” which won him two local Emmy Awards. Later Oscar hosted the 13-week PBS program “From Jump Street : The Story of Black Music,” and was a regular actor on the television series, “ Brewster Place ,” starring Oprah Winfrey. He appeared in several other acting roles, including episodes of “Roc” and the PBS special “Zora Is My Name,” written by Ruby Dee. Oscar Brown Jr. has composed over a thousand songs and more than a dozen full-length theater pieces. After an absence of 20 years from the recording scene, Oscar’s first CD, “ Then and Now,” was released in 1995 on the Weasel Disc label.

More recently, in 1996, “Sin and Soul . . . And Then Some,” his original Columbia recording was re-released as a CD, with five new songs. A compilation of all Mr. Brown’s Columbia releases was released recently in Europe , entitled: “Kicks: the Best of Oscar Brown, Jr.” that includes his classic collaboration with Gwendolyn Brooks on her poem, “Elegy for A Plain Black Boy.” Two of his seven children grew to become performers, with whom he regularly worked until his son, Oscar “Bobo” Brown III, an accomplished bassist, vocalist, and composer, died in a tragic automobile accident on August 12, 1996, at the age of 39.

In April 2001, he and his daughter Maggie made a live concert recording at the Hot House in Chicago resulting in a full-length concert disc that was released in 2002 on Mag Pie Records. A performer until the end, last October, Oscar opened “Jazz at Lincoln Center” in New York , and in March of this year, he celebrated the premier of Donnie Betts’ “Music is My Life, Politics My Mistress,” a documentary film about hislife at the Pan African Film Festival and performed on the Tavis Smiley Show on PBS.

He also made several appearances on hip-hop impressario Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam on HBO and had recently revived his production of “Great Nitty Gritty,” a show about gang violence that he had first staged 20 years earlier with young residents of the Cabrini Green housing project. Oscar served as Regents Professor at the University of California at Riverside , and rendered a “command performance” for the California State Legislature, who honored him with a statewide “Oscar Brown Jr. Day” tribute.

Likewise, Mr. Brown reigned as the 2002 “Senior of the Year” for his hometown, Chicago. Oscar Brown, Jr. actor, director, playwright, songwriter, lyricist, activist, essayist, and television host, called “the High Priest of Hip and the Grandpap of Rap” was a man of such eclectic talents that jazz critic Leonard Feather called him “the most hyphenated figure in show business.” He departed this life on May 29, 2005 in Chicago . Peter Keepnews stated in the New York Times obituary that: Mr. Brown was most often described as a jazz singer, and he initially achieved fame by putting lyrics to well-known jazz instrumentals like Miles Davis's “All Blues” and Mongo Santamaria's “Afro Blue,” but efforts to categorize him usually failed.

Source: James Nadal

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/jun/01/guardianobituaries.jazz

Oscar Brown Jr

Politically committed jazz entertainer who put the message in his music

The singer-poet Oscar Brown Jr, who has died of complications of a blood infection aged 78, was a vocalist whose technique was steeped in jazzy agility and swing, but whose talents were too diverse to allow him to slot conveniently into the "jazz vocalist" category alone. His performances were consistently witty, shrewd, musical and humane, and he wrote lyrics to several classic jazz anthems that sounded integral to them, rather than afterthoughts.

He was also a trenchant observer of hypocrisies and injustices, with a history of intelligent combativeness about citizens' rights - artists' or otherwise - that did not always go down well with the music industry.

He never committed himself so completely to the jazz life as to build a distinct reputation there, and after his success in the 1960s he increasingly tended to be overlooked by the media and the cognoscenti. Yet he continued his live shows until recently, and these often led surprised observers to comment on the injustice of his comparative obscurity.

Brown liked his programmes to have a thematic shape, sometimes devoting a show to the music of his hometown of Chicago, or to where he was performing. On his 75th birthday in Los Angeles, with ageing as his theme, he remarked to the audience: "I'm not so much celebrating it as I am grimly observing it." Yet for those who witnessed it, his performance was still full of an energy, compassion and optimism that testified to his still-flowering gifts, and to the rhythmic momentum he had always drawn from jazz.

A Brown set would include his hit songs - The Snake, or the hypocrisy-puncturing Signifyin' Monkey - but there would be plenty of space for landmarks of jazz composing, like Charlie Parker's Now's The Time or Billie's Bounce, Thelonious Monk's Round Midnight or the Miles Davis classic, All Blues. Brown's lyrics for the last count among his most popular achievements.

Brown was the son of Oscar Brown Sr, a successful lawyer and property broker - who wanted his son to follow the same career path - on Chicago's South Side. He played his first professional gig as a singer on the national radio series, Secret City, when he was 15. He served two years in the US army, and, from only 21, spent five years hosting Negro Newsfront, the first black radio news programme in the country.In the immediate postwar period, with racial prejudice still endemic in the US, Brown wanted to take a bigger step towards making a difference. He ran, unsuccessfully, for the Illinois state legislature in 1948 and, in 1952, contested a Republican congressional primary. He was also a member of the Communist party for a time, and was accused within it of "negro nationalism". Singing and songwriting were still, primarily, his hobbies.

Then in 1958, he attended the opening of Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin In The Sun, about a poor black family living on the South Side of Chicago. He met Hansberry's husband, the New York music publisher Robert Nemiroff, a record deal followed and, by 1960, he was working with bop drummer Max Roach on We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, a landmark session of the civil rights era, and on his own album, Sin And Soul.

He launched Sin And Soul in 1960 with a season at New York's Village Vanguard, and made headlines. Years of song and scriptwriting, guided by intuition and political impatience, had given him a wealth of powerful and engaging material.

Brown and Nemiroff also collaborated on the former's musical Kicks & Co, a project admired by the likes of Martin Luther King and Eleanor Roosevelt. It previewed in Chicago in 1961, but never got to Broadway, though, in 1960, NBC's Today Show gave Brown a two-hour special, focused on it.

Brown found himself singing Brown Baby as news was breaking about a school bombing in Alabama. A flood of letters followed, and Brown said later that the moment had convinced him that the sharing of emotions through music could have political repercussions he had underestimated. He was coming closer to adopting the critical, but healing, role pioneered by his most significant political and artistic guide, Paul Robeson.

Brown began to share bills with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. He invented a one-man show, Oscar Brown Jr Entertains, reworking material from Kicks & Co, and, attracting press accolades like the "high priest of hip", in 1962 introduced the Jazz Scene USA television series. In 1969, on Broadway, Muhammad Ali starred in Buck White, Brown's musical adaptation of a play about a black militant. Brown played the role himself later in San Francisco.

During his career, Brown composed several hundred songs and made 11 albums. He won TV Emmy awards, hosted the 1980 public broadcasting series From Jump Street: The Story Of Black Music, and worked as a screen actor.

He consistently refused to accept the received wisdom that radical politics and sophisticated, ambiguous art could not be joined. He fought to move such material from the world of trade-union fundraisers and obscure independent recordings on to big stages and big labels. He never sidelined his devotion to music for the sake of an agenda. His art was admired by some of the biggest stars in jazz, and his musicianship made friends of enemies.

He is survived by his wife Jean Pace, four daughters and a son.

--Oscar Brown Jr, singer, songwriter, playwright and actor, born October 10 1926; died May 29 2005

http://www.playbill.com/article/oscar-brown-jr-playwright-and-composer-dies-at-78-com-126206

Obituaries

Oscar Brown, Jr., Playwright and Composer, Dies at 78
by Robert Simonson
May 31, 2005

Oscar Brown, Jr., an actor, composer, singer and participant in Chicago and New York theatre, died on May 29 in Chicago, the New York Times reported. He was 78.

Chicago was where Mr. Brown most commonly exercised his theatrical muscles through such shows as Joy 66 and Summer in the City. His Opportunity, Please Knock was created in 1967 with members of the Blackstone Rangers, a street gang, wrote the Times—a typical example of Mr. Brown's penchant for engaging society and politics through his art. In the early '80s came Great Nitty Gritty, a show about gang violence using residents of the notorious Cabrini Green housing project. The show was revived in 2002.

While trying to sell real estate to make a living in the late '50s, he wrote the book, music and lyrics for Kicks & Co., which was supposed to come to Broadway, but shuttered after a few days into its Chicago tryout, despite receiving much publicity through a two-hour segment on the "Today" show with David Garroway. According to Mr. Brown, writing on his website, "The script had to be adapted to fit the 'Today's show format and the political content of it prevented it from being mass-produced."

He did make the big time theatre-wise once. In 1969, his show Buck White, adapted from the book "Big Time Buck White" by Joseph Dolan Tuotti, played Broadway for a handful of performances. The musical featured music and lyrics by Mr. Brown, who also directed (along with his wife Jean Pace). It also featured the only Broadway appearance by boxer Muhammad Ali. According to the Times, Mr. Brown—a handsome man with a thoughtful face, thick eyebrows and, later, a moustache and beard—stepped into the Ali part in a San Francisco production.

More recently, Off-Broadway in fall 2003, performer-pianist Genovis Albright and the Oscar Brown Trio serenaded Off-Broadway audiences with the blues and jazz songs of Mr. Brown in Serenade the World at the John Houseman Studio.

The multi-talented Oscar Brown, Jr., wrote numerous songs over his career, many in the jazz and gospel veins. He made his recording debut as a singer on Columbia Records in 1961 with the album "Sin and Soul...And Then Some." Critical acclaim followed. Soon after, he debuted at the Village Vanguard jazz club in New York, and went on to share the bill with such jazz greats as Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane. As a songwriter, he famously put lyrics to jazz instrumentals like Miles Davis' "All Blues," Bobby Timmons and Nat Adderley's "Dat Dere" and Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue." He also wrote the lyrics for the socially conscious Max Roach album "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite." Nina Simone covered Mr. Brown's "Rags and Old Iron," "Work Song," and "Forbidden Fruit" on her album "Forbidden Fruit," and covered "Brown Baby" on "Nina at the Village Gate."

As an actor, he was a regular on "Brewster Place" and had a recurring role as a jazz pianist on the Fox sitcom "Roc." He was married twice, and is survived by his wife Jean Pace; a son, Napoleon; four daughters, Maggie Brown, Donna Brown Kane, Iantha Casen and Africa Pace Brown. Maggie is a vocalist in the Chicago area. Another son, Oscar III, died in an car accident on the Outer Drive expressway in Chicago in August 1996.

Filmmaker donnie l. betts speaks about Oscar Brown, Jr.:

Chivonnie of Reelblack TV speaks with award-winning filmmaker donnie l. betts about his latest documentary, "Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress: The Story Of Oscar Brown, Jr" in this exclusive interview.

Visit www.musicismylife.info to order the director's cut DVD.

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6uy0ulyWb8

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: This is The Actual Thoroughly Corrupt, Cynical, Criminal and Deeply White Supremacist Society We Currently Live In (And Have Historically ALWAYS Lived in) and You Know It. The Late Botham Jean Could Easily Tell You That As Well (Except that He's No Longer Here To Say So)...

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 16:41:54 +0000

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/amber-guyger-ex-dallas-police-officer-granted-parole-botham-jean-murde-rcna600983

U.S. news

Amber Guyger, ex-Dallas police officer, granted parole after Botham Jean murder conviction

Guyger was sentenced to 10 years in prison for fatally shooting Jean, her neighbor, after walking into his apartment in 2018.

Listen to this article with a free profile

Former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger in court in 2019. She told authorities that she shot her neighbor after she mistakenly walked into his apartment, believing it to be her own. Tom Fox / The Dallas Morning News via AP

by Matt Lavietes
October 1, 2026
NBC News

A former Dallas police officer was granted parole Thursday, just under seven years after she was convicted of murdering her neighbor in a 2018 shooting.

Amber Guyger, 38, was granted parole by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, the board said in a statement. In 2019, Guyger was convicted of murdering Botham Jean, a 26-year-old Black man.

Guyger told authorities that she shot Jean after she mistakenly walked into his apartment, believing it to be her own, according to officials. She told authorities she believed Jean was an intruder. Jean was eating ice cream in his living room and was not armed, according to authorities.

Guyger was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Prosecutors had asked jurors to sentence her to at least 28 years.

The Texas board said that Guyger was granted parole because she did not have a documented pattern of violent arrests, she “maintained a satisfactory institutional adjustment,” and she completed programs “that should enhance chances to obtain and maintain full-time stable employment” during her imprisonment.

Guyger initially became eligible for parole on Sept. 29, 2024. Her initial review occurred Oct. 10, 2024, and resulted in a parole denial, with her next review being scheduled in or about this month.

During her trial, questions were raised about the role race may have played in the killing.

Prosecutors revealed racist text messages Guyger sent, unrelated to Jean or his killing.

One of the texts was about the Martin Luther King Jr. parade in Dallas in 2018.

“When does this end lol,” an officer wrote to Guyger.

“When MLK is dead ... oh wait ...,” she joked.

Two days before Guyger killed Jean, she texted someone who had just adopted a German shepherd.

The dog’s owner wrote that the dog “may be racist.”

Guyger replied: “It’s okay ... I’m the same.”

A demonstrator with a photo of Botham Jean during a protest against police killings in Revere, Mass., in 2020. Erin Clark / Boston Globe via Getty

Prosecutors said Jean was watching television and eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream in his living room just before 10 p.m. when Guyger burst inside and shot him.

Guyger testified that she used her electronic key fob to open Jean’s door and that she immediately drew her service weapon once she was inside.

The prosecution said the trajectory of the bullet showed that Jean was either getting up from his couch or cowering when Guyger fired at him.

A lawyer for Jean’s family, Lee Merritt, said in a statement to NBC News Dallas-Fort Worth that the family was “disappointed by the decision.”

“A 10-year sentence was already a fraction of what was lost,” Merritt said. “Releasing Ms. Guyger after seven years makes that loss feel even smaller in the eyes of the system. It is not. The family still lives with this loss every day.”

Jean’s family asked for privacy in a statement Thursday.

“To all of the many well-wishers who have continued to say Botham’s name and carry his memory, they wish to give their thanks for the continuing support,” the family said.

Jean’s brother, Brandt Jean, said he forgave Guyger during her sentencing in 2019.

“I personally want the best for you,” he said at the time. “I wasn’t even going to say this before my family, but I don’t even want you to go to jail. I want the best for you, because I know that’s exactly what Botham would want you to do — to give your life to Christ.”

The Dallas Police Department said in a statement that it had “no role in this decision.”

“The Dallas Police Department understands this decision may bring renewed attention and emotion surrounding the tragic death of Botham Jean,” it said. “Our thoughts remain with the Jean family and all those impacted by his loss.”

Jean grew up in St. Lucia before he came to the U.S. to go to Harding University in Arkansas, which he graduated from in 2016. He was working as an accountant for one of the most prestigious accounting firms in the world, PricewaterhouseCoopers, in Dallas when he was killed.

He would have turned 35 years old Tuesday.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Matt Lavietes

I’m a reporter on NBC News’ breaking news team, covering crime, extreme weather, pop culture and more. I recently covered Hurricane Milton, which devastated the Tampa, Florida, metropolitan area, and the student-led protests at Columbia University.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/dallas-local-government/article/botham-jean-s-family-fights-make-dallas-pay-22460181.php

News//Dallas Local Government

Botham Jean’s family fights to make Dallas pay $98.65M judgment against Guyger
With Guyger granted parole, Jean’s family argues Dallas’ insurance plan should cover damages for his wrongful death.

by Karen Brooks Harper
October 3, 2026
The Dallas Morning News

The family argues the city, which provided liability coverage to Guyger as a Dallas police officer, is responsible for the federal civil judgment over Jean’s wrongful death and the violation of his rights.

Guyger shot and killed Jean in September 2018 inside his own apartment, saying she mistook it for her own and believed he was an intruder. She was off duty, but still in uniform, after a nearly 14-hour shift.

She was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2019 for Jean’s murder. After being granted parole this week, Guyger will serve the remainder of her sentence outside prison under parole supervision. It is unclear when she will be released.

Jean’s family filed a new lawsuit in March seeking to get the city of Dallas — which was Guyger’s insurance provider as a police officer — to pay the nearly $100 million judgment instead of Guyger.

“If a police officer makes a mistake when they decide to pull the trigger, they are on their own. You can pay your taxes to fund the insurance plan, but if you are harmed by an officer’s mistake, you are on your own,” said Dallas attorney Lisa Blue, who is representing Jean’s family.

City officials say its insurance plan does not cover the shooting, leaving Dallas with no liability for the judgment.

The family’s lawyers argue that position would deny Jean’s survivors restitution, saddle Guyger with an impossible debt and let Dallas avoid accountability for its employee’s actions.

Blue said the lawsuit and Guyger’s parole have resurfaced the pain of losing Jean.

“The loss of Botham has left our family forever dismembered, and that is something we continue to live with every day,” the family said in a statement Friday.

Guyger is not involved in the family’s suit. But if they win, Guyger would be off the hook for the damages and the onus would be on the city to pay them. A hearing was scheduled but postponed at the city’s request, Blue said. A new date has not been set.

City officials have declined to comment on pending litigation, but its attorneys have said in court filings that the city insurance plan does not have to cover losses that occur if a plan member commits “criminal acts and other willful and intentional misconduct and wrongdoing.” Guyger’s murder conviction proves she did just that, the city attorneys said.

City should pay family, suit says

Jean’s death is an example of why insurance plans were created, Blue said. The suit says the city is legally responsible as an insurer and is also morally responsible because its own police staffing practices put its officers at risk of making mistakes. The city called that argument irrelevant.

Central to Guyger’s defense was that she never intended to do anything but defend herself in a moment she believed was threatening. Blue is not seeking to dispute the trial jury’s guilty verdict, but doesn’t believe that Guyger intentionally committed a crime.

“You can’t say it wasn’t an accident. She shot an innocent man sitting in his apartment eating ice cream. I mean, that’s an accident,” Blue said in a phone interview. “Of course, she intentionally pulled the trigger, but she did not intentionally violate the law. She thought she was following the law, but made a terrible, tragic mistake. That is exactly what insurance is for.”

Amber Guyger, shown with defense attorney Toby Shook during her 2019 murder trial, was granted parole Thursday. Tom Fox/Staff Photographer

The city has taken the position that governmental immunity under the Texas Constitution protects it from lawsuits by people seeking monetary damages and that Jean’s family has no standing to make a claim against the insurance plan.

On the night of Sept. 6, 2018, Guyger had worked a long shift. She had already been on 11-hour shifts for the previous four days when she arrived at the wrong floor of her parking garage, entered the wrong hallway and opened the wrong door to Jean’s apartment, which was just above hers.

The lights were out in the apartment, and the door swung open when she tried to unlock it. She saw a figure on the couch. She fired twice.

“I’m so tired,” she told 911 operators that night as she tried to figure out her mistake.

The recent lawsuit alleges the city had long been violating its own ordinances by understaffing its police department, resulting in excessive work hours and a stressed-out, exhausted force.

Guyger was fired a few weeks after Jean’s death and jailed on a manslaughter charge. A grand jury later indicted her for murder. After her 2019 conviction, the city stopped paying for her attorney, leaving her destitute and unable to afford any more lawyers.

City claims immunity

Attorneys for the family sued the city and Guyger in federal court in 2024. The city was allowed out after arguing immunity and saying it did not have cover her in the intentional commission of a crime.

“The city of Dallas really, really let this family down. They [the city] fought so hard not to be responsible for what happened with Botham,” said Daryl Washington, who represented the Jean family in the 2024 civil suit. “You have families whose lives have been torn apart, and they will never be the same. And it makes it even worse when these cities fight so hard not to be held accountable for the actions of people who they hired.”

Brandt Jean, brother of shooting victim Botham Jean (second from left), hugs his sister Allisa Findley during a press conference outside the Frank Crowley Courts Building in reference to the shooting of Jean by Dallas police officer Amber Guyger, Monday, September 10, 2018. He was joined by his mother, Allison Jean (left) and attorney Benjamin Crump (right). Tom Fox/Staff Photographer

Even the attorneys who won that lawsuit two years ago doubt the family family will ever see restitution if Guyger is the one paying for it.

“I have so much empathy for this woman,” said Blue, who said she has not spoken to Guyger but hopes to meet her during the suit. “She made a terrible mistake that’s going to follow her for the rest of her life. I mean, her name is all over the world.”

Meanwhile, Jean’s family attorneys say, Botham’s death by a city employee — whose salary and insurance were paid for by his tax dollars — leaves nothing but a hole while they wait for restitution that may never come.

The money isn’t the whole thing, Blue said. But there are few other options, she said, for validating the enormity of their loss and perhaps removing their financial worries as they grieve.

“There is not a citizen in Dallas who would think it’s fair for the city to deny insurance coverage,” Blue said. “The only thing we can do for this poor family is try to get them some compensation.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Karen Brooks Harper

Karen Brooks Harper is a senior writer covering Texas politics. A Mizzou Tiger with nearly 30 years in Texas journalism, she has also covered the cartel wars along the border, Congress in Mexico City, 3 presidential races, and 6 hurricanes. Raised on blues in the MS Delta, she lives in ATX with her son, her boxing gloves, and her guitar. In that order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Botham_Jean

Murder of Botham Jean

On the night of September 6, 2018, 26-year-old accountant Botham Jean was murdered in Dallas, Texas, by off-duty Dallas Police Department patrol officer Amber Guyger, who entered Jean's apartment and fatally shot him. Guyger, who said that she had entered Jean's apartment believing it was her own and believed Jean to be a burglar,[1][2] was initially charged with manslaughter. The absence of a murder charge led to protests and accusations of racial bias because Jean—an unarmed black man—was killed in his own home by a white off-duty officer who had apparently disregarded police protocols. On November 30, 2018, Guyger was indicted for murder.[3] In October 2019, she was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment.[4] The ruling was upheld on appeal twice in 2021.[5] In November 2024, she was found liable in a wrongful death lawsuit for killing Jean and was ordered to pay Jean's family $98.65 million.[6] She was granted parole on October 1, 2026.[7]
Murder

Wikimedia | © OpenStreetMap

Location of the murder[8]

Botham Jean and Amber Guyger lived in separate apartments in South Side Flats, a four-story apartment complex located at the corner of South Lamar Street and Powhattan Street two blocks northwest of the headquarters of Dallas Police Department where Guyger worked as a patrol officer in the Cedars district in South Dallas.[9] The floor plans for each level of the building are mostly identical. Guyger's apartment on the third floor (number 1378), in which she had lived for approximately two months by the time of the murder, was located directly below Jean's apartment on the fourth floor (number 1478).[10]

On September 6, 2018, Guyger left work at 9:33 pm at the end of a 13.5-hour shift. She drove to the apartment complex, parking her vehicle in the parking garage of the fourth floor at 9:46 pm.[10] At this time, she was speaking over the phone with her romantic partner, who had telephoned her during her journey home, in a conversation which lasted until 9:55 pm.[11] She was still wearing her uniform and handgun.[11][12] Guyger walked to Jean's apartment, which she would later say she thought was her own, although there were prominent visual clues that she was on the wrong floor, including the distinctive red doormat outside Jean's apartment and the absence of a large planter like the one outside her apartment.[11][12]

Attempting to unlock the door, she noticed it was ajar;[13] although apartment doors at the complex had automatic electronic locks, the one on Jean's door was defective and did not always latch if the door was not closed forcibly.[12] She entered the apartment and found Jean sitting in his living room eating ice cream, unarmed, with his laptop open and turned on.[12][14][15] Although their apartments had the same floorplan, Jean's apartment had more furniture, including a coffee table and ottoman in front of the couch, and his television was substantially larger.[12] Guyger fired her handgun twice at Jean, striking him in the chest.[16] She would later testify that she believed him to be an intruder,[17] and that she feared he would kill her.[18] Guyger telephoned 9-1-1 at 9:59 pm.[19] Jean was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died from his wound. The Texas Rangers investigated the shooting, which led to Guyger's arrest three days later.[20]

Guyger was initially charged with manslaughter, but was later charged with murder.[14] The initial charge of manslaughter and the racial aspect of the shooting resulted in protests in the following days.[14]

The Dallas Police Department placed Guyger on paid administrative leave after the shooting. The department fired her on September 24, 2018.[21]

Botham Shem Jean, a 26-year-old Black man, was a Harding University alumnus and an accountant for PwC. Jean was born in Saint Lucia.[23]: 1 [24]

Following the shooting, an attorney representing Jean's family accused the Dallas Police Department of attempting to smear Jean's reputation by publicizing a police affidavit showing that police seized 0.368 ounces (10.4 g) of marijuana from Jean's apartment.[25] The lawyers also disputed the account of the incident that Guyger told officials, which was recorded in the arrest warrant affidavit, and asserted that two independent witnesses had come forward to give recollections that conflicted with Guyger's account. An attorney for Jean's family asserted that witnesses claimed to have heard knocking on the door to Jean's apartment and that they had heard a woman's voice saying "Let me in, let me in."[26]

saying "Let me in, let me in."[26]

Perpetrator

Amber Renée Guyger (born August 9, 1988)[27] was 30 years old at the time of the shooting. She had been with the Dallas Police Department for almost five years.

Criminal trial

On November 30, 2018, Guyger was indicted on murder charges by a Dallas County grand jury.[28] On September 22, 2019, the day before the trial began, Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot took part in an interview regarding the trial in spite of a gag order issued by Judge Tammy Kemp in January of that year. After questioning jurors, who reported that they had not seen the interview or other media coverage of the trial, Kemp denied the defense's motion for a mistrial, and sequestered the jury.[29]

Manslaughter charges would have merely required proof of recklessness, while murder charges require proof that the defendant intended to cause either great bodily harm or death (with death resulting).[30] The prosecutors alleged criminal intent for two reasons: firstly, they said her arrival at the wrong apartment (on the wrong floor) was not caused by tiredness, but rather caused by the conversation she had immediately prior with her lover trying to arrange a meeting that night, and secondly that she did not follow standard police protocol of not entering a building with a potential burglar inside and instead calling for backup from the police station, which was only two blocks away.[30]: 1 [31]

On October 1, 2019, Guyger was found guilty of murder.[32] The jury deliberated for six hours to reach the verdict of murder.[30] The jurors also considered the lesser charge of manslaughter.[30] She was the first Dallas police officer to be convicted of murder since the 1973 murder of Santos Rodriguez.[30]

On October 2, 2019, Guyger was sentenced to 10 years in prison after the jury deliberated for an hour.[4] During the sentencing hearing, Jean's mother Allison provided emotional testimony and some of Guyger's text messages and social media posts that were "racist and offensive" were shared.[33] Jean's younger brother Brandt forgave and hugged Guyger during her sentencing. Jean's father Bertrum also stated that he forgave Guyger but had wanted a stiffer sentence.[34][35][36][37]

Guyger's legal bills were paid by the Dallas Police Association, a police union for Dallas officers.[38]

On October 16, 2019, Guyger's attorneys filed a notice of appeal requesting a new trial.[39][40] On August 7, 2020, Guyger's attorneys filed an appeal, alleging that insufficient evidence existed to convict her of murder. The appeal sought either an acquittal, or a reduction in charge to criminally negligent homicide with a new hearing for sentencing on the reduced charge.[41] On August 5, 2021, the Fifth Court of Appeals of Texas upheld Guyger's murder conviction, unanimously holding that the jury verdict was reasonable and Guyger's own testimony supported the murder charge.[42][43] On November 17 of that year, the court withdrew its previous opinion, but again upheld her murder conviction using similar reasoning, stating that her defense that she had unknowingly entered the wrong apartment did not justify the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide.[44][45] Her appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the court of last resort for criminal cases in the state, was denied.[46][47]

Guyger was imprisoned in the Patrick O'Daniel Unit (formerly the Mountain View Unit).[48] She was initially eligible for parole in September 2024 after she had served half her sentence,[49] but she was denied parole in October 2024.[50]

Guyger was granted parole on October 1, 2026, but it was not immediately made clear when she would be released.[7]

Controversy regarding police car camera

After the shooting, Guyger was detained and placed in the patrol car of Dallas police sergeant Breanna Valentine, who was then approached by Sergeant Mike Mata, Valentine's superior and president of the Dallas Police Association. Mata told Valentine to shut off the in-car camera, which recorded sound, so that he and Guyger could talk privately, and Valentine complied. Mata testified at Guyger's trial that turning off the camera was standard procedure intended to protect Guyger's attorney–client privilege, as she was planning to call her attorney.[51][52][53] Guyger's defense attorney endorsed Mata's statement,[51] but prosecutors disputed whether it was appropriate or normal to turn off the camera, saying that Guyger was given special treatment because she was a police officer.[51][53] Valentine testified that she sequestered Guyger in the patrol car to isolate her from the situation, but surveillance footage showed Mata allowing Guyger to exit the patrol car afterwards, talking to her, and allowing her to interact with friends and other officers.[51][53]

Dallas police policies at the time allowed an officer to turn off recording devices when, in the officer's judgment, there was no likelihood of "anything else evidentiary or law enforcement value occurring." [sic][51] Jean's family and community members said that turning off the camera led to a loss of evidence.[52] Valentine testified that she would not have turned it off if she had realized that Guyger was off-duty when the shooting occurred.[51] Mata denied wrongdoing and said that he welcomed an investigation by internal affairs.[53] In July 2020, prosecutors referred Mata to grand jury for tampering with evidence, but the jury declined to indict him. A Dallas police spokesman said that an internal investigation into Mata's conduct would continue. Mata declined to comment to the Dallas Morning News.[54]

Controversies involving witnesses

On January 31, 2019, ABC News reported that a female witness—identified only as "Bunny" — had taken a video of Guyger's actions immediately after the shooting. The witness claimed to have been harassed and threatened by unidentified Internet trolls after providing the video to the Dallas County District Attorney's Office and later posting it on social media.[55]

On October 4, 2019, key prosecution witness and Jean's across-the-hall neighbor, Joshua Brown, was shot and killed in the parking lot[56] of another apartment complex he had moved to, about 5 miles (8.0 km) from where Jean and Guyger had lived.[57][58] Witnesses could not describe the shooter or shooters, only the vehicle they drove.[59]

On October 8, Dallas police announced that they had identified three suspects in Brown's killing and had arrested one of them, and that the suspects were engaged in a drug deal with Brown when he was shot.[60] A search of Brown's apartment yielded 12 pounds (5.4 kg) of marijuana, 5.04 ounces (143 g) of THC cartridges and $4,000 in cash; however, advocates questioned police claims that the three men had traveled 300 miles (480 km) from Alexandria, Louisiana, to purchase drugs from Brown, and an attorney representing Brown's family called for an independent investigation by another agency. Dallas Assistant Police Chief Avery Brown denied that Joshua Brown's death was related to Guyger's trial.[61] A second suspect was arrested the next day,[62] and on December 8, all three men were indicted on charges of capital murder, although one of them remained at large.[63]

Civil trial

On November 20, 2024, a civil trial jury awarded Jean's family $98.65 million, including about $60 million in punitive damages and $38.6 million in compensatory damages, in a wrongful death claim against Guyger—a figure nearly double what the family sought.[6][64] The family said that Dallas police inadequately trained Guyger and also named the city of Dallas as a defendant, but the city was dismissed from the lawsuit, leaving Guyger solely responsible for paying the damages.[64] Guyger initially represented herself but did not appear at trial and declined to provide legal representation.[6][64] The family said it will donate any damages they receive to the Botham Jean Foundation, potentially including the proceeds from any film or book deals made by Guyger.[6] The family acknowledged they are unlikely to receive the full amount.[6]

Memorials

Dallas Police headquarters in 2021, with updated Botham Jean Blvd. (formerly Lamar St.) sign.

On January 13, 2021, the Dallas City Council unanimously voted to rename approximately 4 miles (6.4 km) of South Lamar Street from Interstate 30 to South Central Expressway (S.M. Wright Freeway) as Botham Jean Boulevard. The street passes Jean's former apartment and Dallas police headquarters.[65]

As a reaction to the controversy over the police car camera, Texas state representative Carl O. Sherman sponsored Texas House Bill 929, known as the Botham Jean Act, to enhance police accountability.[52] The Act made it illegal for police to disable body cameras at any time during their active participation in an investigation. It also requires that law enforcement policies regarding body cameras include stipulations about collecting the camera, video recording, and audio recording as evidence. The Act took effect in September 2021.[52][66]

See also

List of unarmed African Americans killed by law enforcement officers in the United States

List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States, September 2018

Shooting of Atatiana Jefferson
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Mitchell, Mitch (September 25, 2019). "Lead investigator doesn't believe Amber Guyger's killing of Botham Jean was a crime". Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Retrieved October 15, 2023.

Emily, Jennifer (September 14, 2018). "Evidence Released in Botham Jean Slaying Prompts Allegations of 'Smear Campaign'". The Dallas Morning News. Retrieved October 3, 2019.

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Emily, Jennifer; Smith, LaVendrick; Branham, Dana (October 1, 2019). "Amber Guyger convicted of murder for killing Botham Jean; sentencing phase to continue Wednesday". The Dallas Morning News. Archived from the original on October 2, 2019. Retrieved October 2, 2019.

"Jurors in Amber Guyger's murder trial watch officers' desperate efforts to revive Botham Jean". Dallas News. September 24, 2019.

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"Victim's family disputes official account of the moments before Amber Guyger shot Botham Jean". Dallas News. September 10, 2018. Retrieved September 14, 2018.

"Dallas officer faces manslaughter charge in fatal shooting of neighbor". CBS News. September 10, 2018.

"Sources: Fired cop Amber Guyger indicted on a murder charge in Botham Jean killing". WFAA. November 30, 2018. Retrieved November 30, 2018.

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"Weeping on the stand, Amber Guyger yells 'keep going!' at the lawyer". September 27, 2019. Guyger said she mistakenly thought she had parked on her own level in her apartment building's parking garage. 'I kept thinking I was so lucky' for finding a spot next to the entry door, she said, making it easier to carry her gear into her apartment.

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Prosser, Maggie (November 18, 2021). "Dallas appeals court again upholds Amber Guyger's conviction for the murder of Botham Jean". The Dallas Morning News. Dallas, Texas. Retrieved November 18, 2021. "That she was mistaken as to Jean's status as a resident in his own apartment or a burglar in hers does not change her mental state from intentional or knowing to criminally negligent," the justices wrote. The justices made a similar statement in their ruling on her first appeal.

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Keller, Aaron (August 6, 2021). "Texas Court of Appeals Upholds Ex-Cop Amber Guyger's Conviction for Murdering Botham Jean in His Apartment". Dan Abrams. Retrieved August 7, 2021.

Myers, Doug; Hudson, Giles (October 11, 2024). "Former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger denied parole for Botham Jean murder - CBS Texas". www.cbsnews.com. Retrieved October 13, 2024.

Smith, LaVendrick; Emily, Jennifer; Jaramillo, Cassandra; Branham, Dana (September 24, 2019). "Police treated Amber Guyger special on night of shooting, prosecutor argues". The Dallas Morning News. Dallas, Texas. Retrieved February 18, 2025. Officers can terminate a recording when there is no likelihood of "anything else evidentiary or law enforcement value occurring." It is a violation of the department's general orders for "an officer to fail to activate the body worn camera or intentionally terminate a recording in order to commit a violation of the department policy or law."

Briggs, Shakari (June 17, 2021). "Abbott signs Botham Jean Act into law, increasing police accountability". Spectrum News 1 Austin. Austin, Texas. Retrieved February 19, 2025.

Rabb, Shaun (October 3, 2019). "Dallas Police Association president denies any wrongdoing in Amber Guyger case". KDFW. Dallas, Texas. Retrieved February 19, 2025.

Branham, Dana (July 28, 2020). "Grand jury declines to indict Dallas Police Association president, who faced tampering allegations in Guyger case". The Dallas Morning News. Dallas, Texas. Retrieved February 19, 2025.

Jacobo, Julia (January 31, 2019). "Neighbor who filmed wrong apartment shooting aftermath says she's had death threats". ABC News. Retrieved October 6, 2019. Bunny said her employer let her go, explaining that they "didn't want their company associated with a high-profile case."... ABC News could not independently confirm her claims that she was fired, or, if so, why.

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"Witness in Guyger Trial Shot, Killed Friday Night". NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth. KXAS-TV. October 7, 2019. Retrieved January 18, 2021.

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"Second arrest made in murder of witness in Amber Guyger murder trial". NBC News. October 9, 2019.

"3 men indicted on capital murder charges in slaying of Joshua Brown, witness in Amber Guyger's trial". Dallas News. December 8, 2019.

Snyder, Rachel; Sullivan, Cole (November 20, 2024). "Amber Guyger ordered to pay Botham Jean's family more than $98M in damages in civil case". Dallas, Texas: WFAA. Retrieved November 22, 2024.

Bailey, Everton Jr. (January 13, 2021). "Dallas City Council approves renaming street in memory of Botham Jean". The Dallas Morning News. Dallas, Texas. Retrieved January 14, 2021.

"87(R) HB 929 - House Committee Report version - Bill Text". capitol.texas.gov. Retrieved October 11, 2024.

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The POTUS is A Liar, A Thief, A Hustler, A Con Man, A Criminal, A Gangster, A Predator, A Psychopath, and A Fascist And We Have the Receipts To Prove It (And So Do You If You Also Have The Necessary Honesty, Integrity, Morality, and Simple Common Sense To Say So).

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:50:34 +0000

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/us/politics/trump-ads.html

Trump Directed Use of Taxpayer Money for Ads Praising His Presidency

The government-funded ads show just how much President Trump has been able to use federal money for his own aims.

Listen · 10:54 minutes

VIDEO: An ad that was approved by President Trump and paid for by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Credit: via YouTube

by Maggie Haberman
Hamed Aleaziz
Shane Goldmacher
Jonathan Swan

October 2, 2026

New York Times

President Trump personally instructed his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising him and his presidency, setting in motion a $20 million contract that used funds from the Department of Homeland Security, according to people familiar with the matter.

The ads have run across cable and network television — on Fox News, CNN and MS Now, with football games on Fox and with national newscasts on CBS, ABC and NBC, including “Meet the Press,” which Mr. Trump is known to watch.

Mr. Trump was eager to see the laudatory ads on the air and told Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to come up with the money from within the government, the people said. Mark Paoletta, the budget office’s counsel, and Will Scharf, the White House counsel, both said it would be legal to use D.H.S. funds. The president and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, both spoke with Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, about the ads.

On Sept. 20, U.S. Customs and Border Protection — which falls under D.H.S. — awarded the contract to LMD, a Maryland marketing firm, federal records show.

This article is based on interviews with 12 people familiar with the president’s interest in the ads and how they came to be. They spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the president’s demand.

The taxpayer-funded ads have been criticized by Democrats and even some Republicans as a possible violation of federal laws against using taxpayer dollars for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” And they come as the president is also directing spending from his super PAC — MAGA Inc., which entered the fall with $400 million — for which he has been raising money since he won re-election in 2024.

It was not clear why taxpayer funds, and not money from the super PAC, were used for the spots.

The White House has called the ads public service announcements and said they are appropriate because there is no “call to action” to vote for any candidate. Some of his aides also noted that Mr. Trump is not running for office now, in an attempt to blunt criticism of the ads as violating federal laws about the use of public money.

When pressed by a reporter on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said: “If somebody said that that’s wrong, I’ll gladly pay the money.”

“But these are ads for the country,” he added. “You have to understand. I’m not promoting a candidate. I’m not promoting myself because I’m not running for office. I’m promoting the country.”

At least four spots have run so far, at a cost of about $5.5 million, and that is expected to grow, according to the media tracker AdImpact and people familiar with the spending. One played images of Mr. Trump to the song “Love Me” by Christian Berishaj, who performs as JMSN. (The artist has protested the use of his song.)

Sign up to get Maggie Haberman's articles emailed to you. Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent reporting on President Trump. Get it sent to your inbox.

Another was identical to a Trump campaign video from 2024 that condemns “villains” whom the president perceives as enemies. The use of material originally made during Mr. Trump’s political campaign has given fuel to critics who reject the White House claim that the ads are simply public service announcements.

A third ad, about the Iran war, features remarks from both Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Such public service spots typically say which agency paid for them. In this case, all of the ads had an unusual tagline: “Paid for by the U.S. government.”

Fighter jets fly over the White House before an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on June 14 that was attended by President Trump and Dana White, the U.F.C. president who was featured in an ad paid for by a Trump-linked nonprofit. Credit: Kenny Holston/The New York Times

‘Love Me’

On Aug. 7, Mr. Trump was in the Oval Office with a group of Republican strategists working with his team, along with James Blair, his top political adviser, and Ms. Wiles. Natalie Harp, his ever-present assistant and provider of positive news about himself, was there as well.

At the time, Mr. Trump’s advisers were waiting for him to sign off, finally, on spending from his super PAC for midterm candidates, after months of anxiety from Republican candidates about whether he would help them financially in tight races.

But during that meeting, the president was much more interested in looking at videos of himself.

He turned to Ms. Harp and asked her to show the group the type of imagery he favors.

Q&A

Ms. Harp pulled up a series of videos made by the White House digital team on her tablet: Mr. Trump standing in front of vast crowds; Mr. Trump beside Marine One; Mr. Trump with fighter jets streaking overhead.

One video showed Dana White, the U.F.C. president, at the 2024 Republican convention, calling Mr. Trump “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met.” Mr. Trump has talked with delight about that quote repeatedly ever since.

Mr. Trump made clear he planned to travel to support candidates in the midterms, but also that his presidency needed to be promoted, front and center, in the commercials his advisers were making.

Later that month, The Atlantic reported that MAGA Inc. was planning a blitz of midterm ads, with Trump as the centerpiece.

Instead, a Trump-linked nonprofit called Securing American Greatness aired a spot featuring the Dana White quote, spending just under $60,000, according to AdImpact. The ad primarily aired over Sept. 2 and Sept. 3 around Washington, where Mr. Trump was sure to see them.

But then, weeks later, several ads glorifying Mr. Trump began appearing across the country — this time paid for by taxpayers, by way of Customs and Border Protection.

The ads included the “Love Me” spot, in which Mr. Trump says in a voice-over that “America will never be a communist country.”

As the taxpayer-funded spots began running, MAGA Inc. has spent directly to help out in one specific race, putting more than $20 million into the Texas Senate campaign. Two other new groups linked to MAGA Inc. — No Going Back PAC and Safety and Affordability PAC — were recently created and have spent and reserved more than $163 million on spots in races across the country.

But those ads feature Mr. Trump only sparingly.

Asked to comment for this story, the White House press office sent an unsigned statement saying, “These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders and abroad.”

The White House has said there is precedent for using taxpayer money for the ads. “Don’t let the Fake News get away with their lies about our epic Public Service Announcements that have been running on tv,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted on X on Sept. 27.

His office sent out an email stating that “presidential public service announcements are nothing new,” comparing the spots to efforts to promote health care policy in past administrations, or President Woodrow Wilson’s World War I propaganda campaign.

The Government Accountability Office has found likely or confirmed violations of the anti-propaganda rule before, including during the tenures of both President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush. Those cases concerned publicity campaigns related to policies, not ads focused on the presidents themselves.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appeared in a $200 million-plus government ad campaign in 2025 that led to her ouster. Credit: Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

‘This Is My Money’

The money for the ads was freed up on Sept. 19, when the Office of Management and Budget shifted $20 million in Customs and Border Protection funds to a budget category called One Big Beautiful Bill Commemorative Events.

The next day, C.B.P. awarded a $20 million contract to LMD, a marketing firm based in Columbia, Md., that federal records show had past work as a government contractor. The actual purchase of the airtime was made by a second firm, LMO, according to a person familiar with the events, who wasn’t authorized to discuss them publicly.

A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget declined to comment on the reporting for this story. A spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department would only say, “D.H.S. follows all applicable rules for contracting decisions and keeps all decision makers informed. All contracting decisions are made in accordance with applicable law.” Officials with LMD and LMO did not respond to requests for comment.

The spots started out airing narrowly but soon ran in heavy rotation not just on cable channels, but on broadcast networks as well. They ran heavily on the network morning programs like “Good Morning America” and “CBS Mornings,” according AdImpact, and appeared in entertainment shows including “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The Amazing Race.” One aired repeatedly during weekend football broadcasts on the Fox network.

The ads are not the first costly television campaign under Mr. Trump, nor are they the first controversial ones. In 2025, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary at the time, appeared in a $200 million-plus government ad campaign. The ads, which showed Ms. Noem on a horse at Mount Rushmore, ultimately drew the president’s disapproval, and became the justification for replacing Ms. Noem.

The latest ads promoting Mr. Trump come as his standing with the public has dropped. His approval rating sits at around 37 percent, a number that has been low and steady for months, according to a polling tracker by The New York Times. Republicans are increasingly fearful of a Democratic sweep of both House and Senate, and losses in state legislatures.

Mr. Trump has remained a prodigious fund-raiser for his various construction projects around Washington and at the White House, as well as his future presidential library. Last month, he promised to spend “probably” $400 million to $500 million on midterm election races, but he made clear who holds the purse strings to his super PAC.

“This is my money that I control,” Mr. Trump said.

Reporting was contributed by Jim Rutenberg in New York and Luke Broadwater in Washington.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.

Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.

Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.

Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. Contact him securely on Signal: @jonathan.941

See more on: Donald Trump, U.S. Politics, Government Accountability Office, Homeland Security Department, Russell T. Vought, Make America Great Again (MAGA) Inc

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: (It's Now) 10 Years Since The Protest of Colin Kaepernick. The Innate Beauty of Real Struggle in the Public Sphere Is That As Usual, What Goes Around Comes Around.. Thank You Colin...

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:15:09 +0000

10 Years Since The Protest of Colin Kaepernick

Know Your Rights Camp

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wvkJEldKtM&t=4s

Premiered August 14, 2026

#ColinKaepernick #imwithkap

August 14, 2016 was the first day @kaepernick7 sat peacefully to protest against police violence & systemic racism. His heroic and selfless action cost him the career he loved in the NFL. He was blackballed, demonized, and ridiculed for challenging injustice but he never stopped fighting for the people. Ten years later, #ColinKaepernick remains unwavering in his fight for the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities.

HE STILL remains committed to the work. And… WE remain committed to standing with him. Thank you Kap!!!!

#imwithkap #stillwithkap

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: Know Your Rights Camp is a free campaign founded by Colin Kaepernick to raise awareness on higher education, self empowerment, and instructions on how to properly interact with law enforcement in various scenarios.

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:24:48 +0000

https://kaepernick7.com/pages/know-your-rights-camp

Know Your Rights Camp

Know Your Rights Camp is a free national campaign founded by Colin Kaepernick in 2016 to raise awareness on higher education, self empowerment, and instructions on how to properly interact with law enforcement in various scenarios.

DONATE TO COLIN KAEPERNICK'S KNOW YOUR RIGHTS CAMP HERE

OUR 10-POINT SYSTEM

1. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE FREE.

2. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE HEALTHY.

3. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE BRILLIANT.

4. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE SAFE.

5. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE LOVED.

6. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE COURAGEOUS.

7. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE ALIVE.

8. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE TRUSTED.

9. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE EDUCATED.

10. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW YOUR RIGHTS.

https://www.youtube.com/knowyourrightscamp

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Real Truth About the United States That Far Too Few Americans Want To Acknowledge, Face, and Take Responsibility For and Thus Is The Historical Foundation and Present Reality Of the Pervasive Oppressive Tyranny and the Murderous Pathological Lies That Rule and Abuse This Society and The Rest of the World. As always the brilliant and relentlessly prescient Dynamic Duo of Wajahat Ali and Danielle Moodie Weigh In With The Hard And Very Necessary Truth(s) That So Many in this Country (and This World) Are Afraid To Deal With

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 09:28:24 +0000

“This Is Not Who We Are” Is America’s Biggest Lie | Danielle Moodie

Wajahat Ali

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5reIrs6rb0&t=1791s

September 28, 2026

Wajahat Ali

America has a phrase it reaches for whenever the country confronts something ugly: “This is not who we are.” But what if that phrase prevents us from honestly confronting American history? Danielle Moodie joins Wajahat Ali to examine the contradictions between America’s ideals and its history — and why the instinct to separate the country’s present from its past can make it harder to understand what is happening today. Moodie has argued that declaring “this is not who we are” can amount to historical amnesia, overlooking longstanding forces including exclusion, inequality, capitalism and the exercise of political power.

The conversation asks a bigger question: If America wants to become something different, does it first have to acknowledge what it has actually been?

#DanielleMoodie #America #AmericanHistory #Politics #Democracy #WajahatAli #Trump #politicalculture

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: The Eternal Value And Purpose Of the Courage, Dignity, and Integrity Of Colin Kaepernick And Why It (and He) Continues To Matter Greatly No Matter What His Reactionary Enemies, Detractors, and Haters Say. Colin Has Always Deeply Understood and Appreciated the FACT That In Order To Confront and Defeat Fascism One Must Always Be Fully Prepared To Take On Its Pathological Lies and Tawdry Propaganda Via An Ongoing Struggle For Freedom, Justice, Equality, and Self Determination Both Publicly and Privately. We Love You Colin (and Nessa) For Everything You Do And Try To Do In Your and Our Collective FIGHT To Engage And SLAY This Massive Malevolent Force Known As White Supremacy--PART 7

noreply@blogger.com (Kofi Natambu) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 12:07:46 +0000

Colin Kaepernick Addresses Jay-Z, NFL, Workout, & Aftermath Of Protest | Part 3/3

HOT 97

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NsxslSRqt8

September 29, 2026

#HOT97 #colinkaepernick #nessa

In part 3 of 3 of Colin Kaepernick and Nessa’s first interview, Colin gives his account of Jay-Z’s partnership with the NFL and what he says happened privately before the deal was announced. He discusses his conversations with Jay-Z, the NFL’s social-justice initiatives and why he and Eric Reid declined an opportunity connected to them. Colin also breaks down how the controversial NFL workout came together, Jay-Z’s reported role, why he refused to sign the NFL’s waiver and what happened afterward. He addresses whether he still wants to play football and why he would return to the NFL despite everything that happened.

The conversation then gets personal as Colin opens up about The Perilous Fight, fatherhood, what he wants his daughter to learn from his story and what he believes people misunderstand about him. He reflects on the impact the last decade has had on Nessa, Eric Reid and other players who protested, how he has maintained joy and peace through it all, and the emotional toll his journey has had on the people closest to him. Colin Kaepernick’s memoir The Perilous Fight is out now.

The Perilous Fight
by Colin Kaepernicke
Legacy Lit, 2026

SUBSCRIBE: https://hot97.nyc/subscribe

GET MORE: https://hot97.nyc/getmore

#HOT97 #colinkaepernick #nessa #nessaonair

The Panopticon Review

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault

Influence and Influences

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: ICE Must Be Abolished! Here Are Foremost Among The Many Reasons Why

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: On By And About the legendary and innovative writer, artist, and critic Ishmael Reed and his extraordinary life, art, and legacy alongside various reviews, critiques, analyses, encomiums, and celebrations by Kofi Natambu

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: On By And About the legendary and innovative writer, artist, and critic Ishmael Reed and his extraordinary life, art, and legacy alongside various reviews, critiques, analyses, encomiums, and celebrations by Kofi Natambu

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: Excerpt from speech given by Huey P. Newton at Boston College on November 18, 1970. The Black Panther Party Was Co-founded 60 Years Ago on October 15, 1966 by Bobby Seale (b. 1936) and Huey P. Newton (1942-1989) in Oakland, California--PART 3

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: The Black Panther Party Was Co-founded 60 Years Ago Today on October 15, 1966 by Bobby Seale (b. 1936) and Huey P. Newton (1942-1989) in Oakland, California. This Is Their Original 10 Point Program

Bobby Seale speech at the Oakland auditorium: February 17, 1968

All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50 (2016)

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Beware of Fascist America's Very Own Resident Psycho and the Trump Regime's Most Powerful, Malevolent, and RUTHLESS Advisor and Pathologically Criminal Henchman and Corrupt Architect Stephen Miller.

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault

IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

Long Live the Black Radical Tradition: IN TRIBUTE TO AND CELEBRATION OF THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE, ART, AND LEGACY OF LEROI JONES/AMIRI BARAKA. Happy 92nd birthday Amiri!--Part 3

Long Live the Black Radical Tradition: IN TRIBUTE TO AND CELEBRATION OF THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE, ART, AND LEGACY OF LEROI JONES/AMIRI BARAKA. Happy 92nd birthday Amiri!--Part 3

“There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you.”

--Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1934-2014)

PHOTO: Leroi Jones in his apartment in Harlem, NYC 1966

Jitterbugsby LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)

RED LIGHT

by Leroi Jones aka Amiri Baraka, 1966

Long Live the Black Radical Tradition: IN TRIBUTE TO AND CELEBRATION OF THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE, ART, AND LEGACY OF LEROI JONES/AMIRI BARAKA. Happy 92nd birthday Amiri!--Part 2

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: IN TRIBUTE TO AND CELEBRATION OF THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE, ART, AND LEGACY OF LEROI JONES/AMIRI BARAKA (1934-2014). Happy 92nd birthday Amiri!

2026 IS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR OF SIX MAJOR WORLD HISTORICAL FIGURES ALL BORN IN 1926: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, Oscar Brown, Jr. and Michel Foucault

ttps://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2016/07/oscar-brown-jr-1926-2005-legendary_22.html

Oscar Brown, Jr.—“But I Was Cool

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: This is The Actual Thoroughly Corrupt, Cynical, Criminal and Deeply White Supremacist Society We Currently Live In (And Have Historically ALWAYS Lived in) and You Know It. The Late Botham Jean Could Easily Tell You That As Well (Except that He's No Longer Here To Say So)...

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The POTUS is A Liar, A Thief, A Hustler, A Con Man, A Criminal, A Gangster, A Predator, A Psychopath, and A Fascist And We Have the Receipts To Prove It (And So Do You If You Also Have The Necessary Honesty, Integrity, Morality, and Simple Common Sense To Say So).

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: (It's Now) 10 Years Since The Protest of Colin Kaepernick. The Innate Beauty of Real Struggle in the Public Sphere Is That As Usual, What Goes Around Comes Around.. Thank You Colin...

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: Know Your Rights Camp is a free campaign founded by Colin Kaepernick to raise awareness on higher education, self empowerment, and instructions on how to properly interact with law enforcement in various scenarios.

Jitterbugs
by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
(1934-2014)