Amiri Baraka on Marable's Malcolm X

Manning Marable’s Malcolm X

By Amiri Baraka

PREFACE

Marvin X

Amiri Baraka is the Pope of Poetry in the First Poet's Church of the Latter Day Egyptian Revisionists. His review of Manning's book reveals how academics suffer a severe degree of myopia by being disconnected from the street. We agree with Baraka that we cannot dismiss the Nation of Islam as some small sect in the North American African nation. How did such a small sect produce men the stature of Malcolm, Muhammad Ali, Farakhan, and Imam Warithdin? How did such a small sect influence the aesthetic foundation of the Black Arts Movement and Black Studies, to say nothing of black economics and the ideology of self determination? How did such a small sect cause a complete revamping of the black mental landscape by tricking the trick out of the trick?

It is clear from Baraka's review that Manning suffered the crisis of the Negro Intellectual, a severe defect when considering the struggle of the grass roots movement and personalities. Even today, the Negro academics are running behind their ethnic colleagues in understanding the importance of the Nation of Islam in the new genre Muslim American literature. Their fixation on blaming the NOI for the murder of Malcolm has prevented them from any rational understanding of the true significance of the teachings of Elijah Muhammad.

Finally, all revolutions suffer betrayals, assassinations, opportunism and defections. We need to get over our grief and trauma at what happened to Malcolm, or shall we forever, like the Shia, wail and flail ourselves over his martyrdom to the degree we can never approach the practical work Malcolm laid out for us to continue and complete. In short, Malcolm did his work, but what have you done since 1965 and what are you doing now except talking loud and saying nothing.

--Marvin X

5/10/11

Amiri Baraka Reviews Manning's Malcolm X

On Mar 30 I waited for a car that Manning Marable was supposed to send to pick me up at my house so that we could meet later that day in his office at Columbia University because he wanted to interview me as part of an oral history project.

I had met with him two weeks beforeto discuss how Columbia would handle my papers, that is when we scheduled this last project. But the car never came. I called another driver I knew, a friend of mine and we drove to Columbia, but Marable was not there. It seemed no one at the Africana studies department knew where he was. Finally some one word got to me that Manning had gone back into the hospital.

I went back home, the next day I got the news on the internet that he had died.The strangeness of that missed appointment was weird enough, but the fact that his last work on Malcolm X was to be released two days later made the whole ending of our living relationship a frustrating incomplete denouement.

Initially, a friend of mine gave me a copy of the book at a happy discount. Taking it on one of my frequent trips out of town, I began to read. I gave that first copy to my wife when I returned because she had also, as many other people had, been clamoring to read it. As well as asking me relentlessly had I read it.

I bought another copy of the book at the Chicago airport, and I guess started to get into the book seriously. I have known Manning for a number of years. Actually I met him while he was still teaching in Colorado. I even worked under him, when I taught briefly at Columbia University, when he was chairman of the Africana Studies Dept. at Columbia.

As well, I have appreciated one of his books, the DuBois (“Black Radical Democrat”) work and at least appreciated the theme of “How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America”, as well as the entire stance of his acknowledgement of the important aspects of American (Black American) history which had to be grasped.

But as recently as a few weeks ago, ironically I had written him a letter about his journal Souls regarding an essay that quoted a man* who had been accused of participating in the assassination, making some demeaning remarks about Malcolm. My letter questioned the“intelligence” of including the quote since it offered nothing significant to the piece. This was not just loose criticism; I really wanted to know just what purpose the inclusion served. ( *This man Thomas 15X is the same one quoted by Marable as saying that it was the Nation of Islam that burned Malcolm’s house down.)

But with the publication of what some have called “his magnum opus”“Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” it is not just Marable’s inclusion of tidbits of presumed sexual scandal that should interest readers, that I question, but more fundamentally, what was the consciousness that created this work?

First of all I don’t think we can just bull’s-eye the writer’s intentions, we must include Marable’s consciousness as the overall shaper of his intentions, as well as his method. Originally from Ohio, Marable was a freshman in college in 1969; he did not graduate until1971. He has been attached to Academic institutions since 1974, Smith, Tuskegee, Univ. of San Francisco, Cornell, Colgate, Purdue, Ohio State, University of Colorado, Columbia.

It is no denigration of his life to say that Manning was an academic, a well principled one, but an academic nevertheless. But Marable did have a political aspect to his life, which I understood and is why I think he was a very principled academic. He did understand that the “purely” academic was fabrication of the essentially unengaged. That whatever you might do, there was a conscious political stance that your political consciousness had to assume, even if you refused to take it.

So his “membership” in the1970’s National Political Assembly chaired by Richard Hatcher, Mayor of Gary, Indiana, Rep Charles Diggs, the congressman from Detroit and myself as chairman of the Congress of African Peoples, signified that he was aware and a partisan of that attempt to raise and institutionalize Black political consciousness as a way to organize Black people nationally to struggle for Black political power.

In 1974 Marable joined the Democratic Socialists of America, and for a time was even a Vice Chairman of that organization which is called “Left” but is not Marxist and certainly not a Marxist-Leninist organization. It is one of those organizations like the group that split from Lenin’s 2nd International which he called socialists in word but chauvinists in reality.

So it is important that we recognize the specific political base upon which Manning’s“observations” may be judged. He is not simply “observing”. He is making judgments.So that, for instance, for Marable to consistently, throughout his book, call the Nation of Islam a “sect” is a judgment not an observation. The NOI certainly has and had more influence on society than DSA, certainly on Black people. The meaning as a small break awaygroup of a religious order only used now to connote a “jocular or illiterate” character (according to the OUD) is spurious.

But then in relationship to revolutionary Marxism or Marxism –Leninism, DSA certainly fits the description. My point being that Marable must be judged by what he says not by what others say he “intended”. The best thing about the book, of course, is that it raises Malcolm X to the height of our conversation again, and this is a very good thing in this Obama election period. (Post racialit ain’t!)

The very profile of Malcolm’s life, the outline of his life of struggle needs to be spread across the world again, if only to re-awaken the fiercest “blackness” in us to fight this newly packaged “same ol’ same ol”’emergence of white supremacy and racism. Whatever Marable is saying or pointing out, in the end, is to convince us of the superiority of social democracy which he refers to as “the Left”, which is anything from DSA to the Trotskyists. The characterization of Bayard Rustin’s “superior” reasoning in a debate with Malcolm or the response of James Farmer to Malcolm’s bringing a“body guard” to Farmer’s house, “Do you think I want to kill you?” tries to render Malcolm some paranoid case when indeed there were people plotting very actively to kill him.

Ultimately, it is Marable’s own political line that renders the book weakened by his consistent attempts to “reduce” Malcolm’s known qualities and status with many largely unsubstantiated injections,many described by Marable himself as “rumors”. Is there, for instance, any real evidence of Malcolm’s or Betty’s sexual trysts?

People who knew Charles Kenyatta, for example, in Harlem, will quickly recall a vainglorious fool & liar. Could much of this rumor material actually have come from Marable’s “official” sources, the FBI, CIA, BOSS, NYPD, as well as those in the NOI who hated him?

About Malcolm, a sentence like Marable’s “That evening Sharon 6X may have joined him in his hotel” is inexcusable.When I wrote the FBI asking them to release surveillance materials they had gathered on me, at first the director even denied such papers existed. It was Allen Ginsberg’s lawyer that finally got an admission that such papers existed, and that I could get them for ten cents a page. But when I got the papers, it was my wife, Amina, who said how do we know that the information they haven’t crossed out is stuff they want us to see and so confuse us about what was really going on.

I would submit that is exactly what those agencies would do in this case! To assume because you are given “access” to certain information, that that information is not “cooked”, as people around law enforcement say, is to labor in deep naiveté as to whom you are dealing with!

Marable never made any pretensions about being a “revolutionary”. His hookup with the DSA is open acknowledgment that he rejected Lenin’s prescription for a revolutionary organization, or party of the advanced, or such concepts as “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. In fact the DSA says they are not a party, aligning themselves very clearly with Lenin’s opponents in the 2nd International.

Such people, social democrats, are open opponents of revolution, so that at base Marable was opposed to the political logic of Malcolm’s efforts to make revolution. Marable is even more dismissive of the Nation of Islam which he brands a “cult”, a “sect”, dismissing the fact that even as a religious organization, the NOI had a distinct political message, and that it was this message, I think, more than the direct attraction of Islam, that drew the thousands to it

If Marable was giving a deeper understanding of Elijah Muhammad’s call for Five States in the south, he would have mentioned the relationship of this concept to Lenin’s formulation of an Afro American Nation in the black belt south (called that because that is the largest single concentration of Afro Americans in the US).

It was not simply some Negro fantasy. If Marable actually understood the political legitimacy of Malcolm’s Black Nationalism and how Malcolm’s constant exposure to the revolutionary aspects of the Civil Rights movement and the more militant Black Liberation Movement shaped his thinking and made his whole presentation more overtly political and that this was not only negative to the core of the NOI bureaucracy but certainly to the FBI,&c.

They have even written Malcolm X was much safer to them in the Nation than as a loose cannon roaming the planet outside of it. They understood that what Malcolm was saying, even in The Ballot or the Bullet was dangerous stuff. That his admission that all white people might not be the Devil was not morphing into a Dr. King replica but an understanding, as he said at Oxford University, that when Black people made their revolution there would be some white people joining them.

The meeting with the Klan was not Malcolm’s idea, certainly it was Elijah Muhammad’s as it had been Marcus Garvey’s idea before him. Malcolm’s Black Nationalism became more deliberately a Revolutionary Nationalism, such as Mao Tse Tsung (or Cabral or Nkrumah) spoke of, necessary to rally the nation’s forces together to make lst a national revolution to overthrow foreign domination and followed by a revolution to destroy capitalism.

Importantly, Marable does draw a clearer picture of Malcolm’s childhood and early days, especially indicating the Garvey influence his parents taught him and how that would make him open to what Elijah Muhammad taught, unlike the obscure flashbacks of Spike Lee’s version of Malcolm’s early days.

Though Marable ascribes some wholly political “defiance” to the conked hair and zoot suits of the 40’s rather than understanding that there was also a deep organic cultural expression that is always evident in Black life. It is not just a formal reaction to white society. African pants are similarly draped. Access to straightening combs or conkolene are a product of the period, and certainly if any straight hair is gonna be imitated, there was some here before the Latinos.

The “antibourgeois” attitude of the Black youth culture is organic and an expression of the gestalt of black life in the US and Marable seems not to wholly understand it. For instance his take on BeBop as the music of “the hepcats (sic) who broke most sharply from swing, developing a black oriented sound at the margins of musical taste and commercialism”.

BeBop was a revolutionary music, dismissing Tin Pan Alley commercialism and raising the blues and improvisation again as principal to black music.The essential “disconnection “ in the book is Marable’s failure to understand the revolutionary aspects of Black Nationalism, as a struggle for “ Self Determination, Self Respect and Self Defense”. A struggle for equal democratic rights expressed on the sidewalks of an oppressor nation by an oppressed Afro American nationality.

What the book does is try to remove Malcolm from the context and character of an Afro American revolutionary and “make him more human” by dismantling that portrait by redrawing him with the rumors, assumptions, speculations, questionable guesses and the intentionally twisted seeing of the state and his enemies.

Was Captain Joseph (who later changed his name to Yusuf Shah) close to Malcolm? He appeared on television calling Malcolm “Benedict Arnold”and told Spike Lee that I had come up to the Mosque and stood up to question Malcolm and Malcolm told me to “sit down until you get rid of that white woman”.

I met Malcolm only once, the month before he was murdered. This was in Muhammad Babu’s room at the Waldorf Astoria. Babu had just finished leading the revolution in Zanzibar, and would later become Minister of Economics for Tanzania( which was Zanzibar and Tanganyika). At that meeting Malcolm responded to my demeaning of the NAACP by saying I should be trying, instead, to join the NAACP, to make a point about Black people needing a “United Front”.

That idea was not an attempt at “trying to become respectable”, to paraphrase Marable, Malcolm had come to realize that no sectarianism could make the revolution we needed. Interestingly, Stokely Carmichael also called for the building of a Black United Front, and Martin Luther King, when he visited my house in Newark, a week before he was murdered, called for the same political strategy.

It was such a front that was a major part of the national democratic coalition that elected Obama. As for Yusuf Shah, when Spike Lee repeated Shah’s wild allegations about me in his book How I Made The Movie X, I asked a college friend of mine, who had become my part time lawyer, Hudson Reed,to file a suit against Shah demanding he be questioned in court for any “exculpatory”evidence relating to the murder of Malcolm X, particularly as to the involvement of himself and organized crime.

A short time later, Shah, who had moved to Massachusetts, died in his sleep. Marable reports that Captain Joseph/Yusuf Shah’s FBI file was “empty”! It is Marable’s misunderstanding of the revolutionary aspect of Black Nationalism that challenges the portrait not only of Malcolm but of the period and its organizations as well. He treats the split between Malcolm X and the NOI much like he assumes the police did. (Though this is patently false.) As a struggle between “two warring blackgangs”, a sect splitting from the main.

So that there is much more from Marable framing Malcolm’s murder as directed by the NOI, rather than the state. Marable’s general portrait of Malcolm is as doomed and confused individual about whom he could say that “Malcolm extensively read history but he was not a historian”. As if the academic title “HISTORIAN” conferred a more scientific understanding of history than any grassroots’ scholar might have. Simple class bias.

To say of the NOI that it was not a radical organization obscures the Black Nationalist confrontation with the white racist oppressor nation. Marable thinks that the Trots of the SWP or the members of the CP or the Committees of Correspondence are more radical. That means he has not even understood Lenin’s directive as pointed out in Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism, in The National Question, “…The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionaryor a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement.

The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist view o fthe Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such ‘desperate’democrats and ‘socialists’, ‘revolutionaries’ and republicans…was a reactionary struggle. …

Lenin was right in saying that the national movement of the oppressed countries should be appraised not from the point of view of formal democracy but from the point of view of the actual results , as shown by the general balance sheet of struggle against imperialism” –Foundations of Leninism, p77

Marable thinks that the Trots like the SWP or the soi disant Marxistsin CPUSA or the Committees of Correspondence (a breakaway from the CPUSA) or the DSA are more radical than the NOI or Malcolm X. Perhaps on paper. But not in the real world of the Harlem streets.

Malcolm came out the NOI, Dr. King from the reformist SCLC. But both men were more objectively revolutionary on those Harlem streets or in those southern marches than any of the social democratic formations and the social democrats ought to face this. Marable spends most of his time trying to make the NOI Malcolm’s murderers. Information from FBI, BOSS, CIA, NYPD, would tend to push this view, for obvious reasons.

In this vein Marable says that Malcolm’s Africa trips “made his murder all the more necessary from an institutional standpoint.” That Malcolm’s actions “had been all too provocative” to Elijah Muhammad and the NOI. But what about the Imperialist U.S. state and its agencies of detection and murder? They would be more provoked and better able to end such provocation. If there’s a well-known murderer of Malcolm X still running loose as Marable and others have pointed out, how is it he remains free and we must presume that those agencies of the state know this as well as Marable and the others!

But even as he keeps hammering away that it was the Nation of Islam, he still says contradictorily “The fatwa, or death warrant , may or may not have been signed by Elijah Muhammad, there is no way of knowing.” Many of Marable’s claims fall under the same category. He even quotes Malcolm after he was refused entrance into France tha the had been making a “serious mistake” by focusing attention on the NOI Chicago headquarters “thinking all my problems were coming from Chicago and they’re not”.

Asked then from where, Malcolm said “From Washington”.Marable also tells us that even today the FBI refuses to release its reports on Malcolm’s assassination. Yet he will quote one of those agencies without question. Of Betty Shabazz’ death Marable says flatly, of Malcolm’s daughter Qubilah…”her disturbed twelve-year old son set fire one night to his grandmother’s apartment”. How does he know this? Is an official government “information” release that impressive? There are many doubts about that murder; shouldn’t some of them have been investigated?Some of the characterizations in the book are simply incorrect and suffer from only knowing about the movement on paper. Marable saying about Stokely Carmichael, after splitting with “pacifist” Bob Moses and SNCC that he would subsequently join the Black Panthers” is such an example.

Carmichael didn’t join the Panthers; he was “drafted”along with Rap Brown. Marable says in effect that Malcolm misunderstood Martin Luther King’s influence on Black people. He didn’t misunderstand that influence, he was trying to provide an alternative to it.

Though ultimately I believe both leaders later conclusion that a United Front would be the most formidable instrument to achieve equal rights and self-determination for the Afro American people. I would have liked to see Malcolm and Martin in the same organization, and for that matter Garvey & DuBois. They could argue all day and all night and in the end some of us might not agree on the majority’s decision, but like theCongress of the United States we’d have to say “I don’t even agree with that…but that’s what we voted to do”!

Interestingly, on the back of the book are three academics who represent the same social democratic thought as Prof Marable. Gates, who disparages Africa, looks for racism in Cuba not Cambridge and says the Harvard Yard is his nation. My friend Cornell West who in response to me calling out at the Left Forum, “Where are the socialists, where are the communists” shouts“I’m a Christian!” And Michael Eric Dyson who wrote a book on Dr. King calling it the “True Dr. King’ somewhat like Marable’s approach to Malcolm.

But who and what else in the paper “Garden of Even” of “Post Racial America”. So it is necessary that we rid ourselves of the real leaders of our struggle, in favor of Academics who want to tell us we werefollowing flawed leaders with flawed ideas. We don’t need equal rights and self-determination, an appointment to an Ivy League school will do just fine.

--Amiri Baraka

5/4 /11

New Ark

Comments

Baraka hits the nail on the head and pounds it all the way down.

--John Woodford, Editor, Michigan Today, University of Michigan

(former editor of Muhammad Speaks)

Reply Marvin X:

Yes, John, he seems to have a little ideological clarity, call it wisdom that may even transcend ideology. It seems our intellectuals need to do internships at Academy of da Corner!

Peace and love, Marvin

Muslim Unity in the Bay

Muslim Unity in the Bay

1950-2011

A Reunion Celebration of Believers

A Non-secterian Gathering

for persons of spiritual consciousness

July 16, 2011
Defermery Park (Lil Bobby Hutton Park)
18th and Adeline
Oakland

11am til 5pm

Friends of the African American Museum & Library at Oakland
659 Fourteenth Street Oakland, CA 94612 510-659-0200The Mayor’s FY 2011-13 Proposed Budget Threatens to Close the Doors of
AAMLO and OUR HISTORY!

· AAMLO houses 400+ collections of African American history from the
1840s to present day.

· There are over 20,000 books by and about African Americans in its library.

· There is a large collection of Rare Books.

· Exhibits are curated from the Archive Collection and traveling exhibitions.

The Community should make our feelings and intent clear that we want the library to remain open, no other option is acceptable.

We are clearly in the time of White Supremacy institutions closing any ethnic institutions whether libraries, ethnic studies departments,media outlets.

The Grandchildren Have Arrived: Her Name is Mahadevi

Muhammida El Muhajir and daughter Mahadevi





photo Sam Anderson


















And Her name is Mahadevi











by Dr. Melva Green

Monday, April 18, 2011 at 8:11am
Philadelphia, PA

My life tends to be filled with many professional and personal opportunities to stand witness to greatness and beautiful transformative light beings. This past weekend was much like many but with one especially soul stirring moment. For starters, on Friday night I attended a gala honoring civil rights attorney Fred Gray. There I was journeying back in time--not too far back. I couldn't help but to remind myself to never take the civil liberties that were fought for for granted.

Less than 24 hours later, I sat in a room of other Greats. There, filled to capacity with it pouring rain outside were the women attendees of the 8th annual Heal a Woman, Heal a Nation conference. Alongside an amazing panel of relationship experts I journeyed back in time- again not too far back. Not to the 60s/70s or the era of the civil rights movement. No, this time to my own interpersonal metamorphosis movement. Back to the moment of an ego free, unbridled introspection when I "SAW" for the very first time the authentic power of my own mother. I shared from the stage how I released my ego twisted opinions about what she did or did not do to/for me...in fact that "only in seeing the Goddess in her could I ever begin to see the Goddess in me".

From the collective gasp of the audience I knew it was one of many points that resonated with so many women there. Because it is undenaibly a truth. No matter who we are/how we are/or what we accomplish in this life, how we as women "see" THE FIRST WOMAN IN OUR LIVES has everything to do with how we "see" or can't see our true selves. I felt truly grateful just to share my life and love with the women there. But before the afternoon came to a conclusion, I was greeted with the REAL reason for me BEing...there:

There she was. Racing. Back and forth. With the fierce energy and cosmic fire of a shooting star back and forth...to the stage...from the stage. I left the adults, unable to resist her silent call to me. Back and forth WE ran...she picking up candies in the basket...me calling out the names of the sweet treats in a funny voice...she laughing out a "Whoppers...that's funny...I like that".

Me saying "You're so special". She screaming out "I'm so special". Back and forth, fists full of candy...Then she stops. She stops to count the candies - one, two, three...all the way to the 13th candy. My mouth now open, I bellow out to her mother and grandmother "How old is this baby?".

Before I could digest that she was merely 2 years of age, her mother says "she speaks french and another language", a comment to which my little princess angel begins to speak in Chinese. I was stumped!

I say again "You're so special". She "YES! I'M SO SPECIAL. Mommy, Nana she say's I'm so special". They both smile and affirm this truth. Then I say for the 3rd and final time for the afternoon "You're SO AMAZING".

And she filled to the rim with just the right fuel for her FIRE, "YES! I'M SO AMAZING". And before anyone has the chance to say or do anything she races to the edge of the stage leaping off into my arms... without a doubt... knowing that I would catch her... that I would never let her fall...clasping my face in her tiny little hands and kissing me on my left cheek...with all of the LOVE in her WHOLEHEART.

And Her name is Mahadevi. What a name bestowed this great girl-child. Great Goddess she is indeed to have ignited this simple prayer in me:


Women and girls all over the world will re-MEMBER their 2 year old selves...bold, beautiful and boundless. And so it is.

Hotep, Ashe, Shalom, Namaste, Amen

African Mexicans

THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN MEXICO



About the African Presence in México

The existence of Afro-Mexicans was officially affirmed in the 1990s when the Mexican government acknowledged Africa as Mexico's "Third Root." For nearly 500 years, the existence and contributions of African descendants in Mexico have been overlooked, although they have continued to contribute their cultural, musical, and culinary traditions to Mexican society through the present day. This groundbreaking exhibition provides an important opportunity to revisit and embrace the African legacy in Mexico and the Americas while creating significant occasions for cross-cultural dialogue, exchange and presentations for all age ranges and backgrounds. No exhibition has showcased the history, artistic expressions, and practices of Afro-Mexicans in such a broad scope as this one, which includes a comprehensive historical range of artwork including contemporary artistic expressions. [California African American Museum]

REFERENCES:

Aguirre Beltran, Gonzalo [scholar]; “Tribal origins of slaves in Mexico;” Journal of Negro History, Volume 31, Number 3, 1946: pp. 269-352; with maps.

Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (January 20, 1908, Tlacotalpan, Veracruz–1996, Xalapa, Veracruz) was a Mexican anthropologist known for his studies of marginal populations. His work has focused on Afro-Mexican populations. He was the director of the National Indigenous Institute and as Assistant Secretary for Popular Culture and Extra Curricular Education he was responsible for forming policy towards indigenous populations. For this reason he is important in the field of applied anthropology.


Giddings, Joshua R.; “Exiles of Florida,” [1858]; Congressman [Ohio].

The Exiles of Florida is an account of the Florida Wars, which were waged by U.S. forces against an unoffending community of Blacks and Native Americans. In this book Giddings presents evidence of the U.S. Government's role in the destruction of this Florida Community.

[This era began with the British, circa 1710 and is known also as the Yamasee War [South Carolina]; The Tuscarora War [North Carolina]; [Georgia did not exist at that time].


Rebollar (Corona), Rafael [Mexican Filmmaker; Rafael Rebollar Works of Rafael Rebollar; AfroMexico Series:
Rafael Rebollar is one of Mexico's most accomplished documentary directors. His past work includes a series on indigenous culture in Mexico, and a documentary on the cultural and political changes of the 1960s. His films have been invited to participate in festivals in Mexico, Brazil, and the United States.

[1] From Florida to Coahuila (The History of the Black Seminoles) Get Details and Purchasing Info
Rafael Rebollar
Documentary 50 minutes 2002
With English subtitles

AFRICAN PRESENCE IN MEXICO

This documentary tells the remarkable story of a rebel people � the Mascogos, known in the United States as the Black Seminoles. This exceptional community, whose history crosses, borders, languages, and cultures, is descended from escaped slaves who made common cause with the Seminole Indians of Florida. The fierce battles of the Black and Indian Seminoles with the United States in the mid-1800s ended in truce rather than defeat, and they resettled along both sides of the Mexican border. These furious fighters � the only Native American group which never signed a peace treaty with the U.S. - were recruited by both the Mexican and U.S. governments to defend the border from bandits, and served as an elite battalion attached to the U.S. Army. They continue to live in towns like Nacimiento in Coahuila, Mexico, and Bracketteville, Texas. The exceptional Mascogo/Black Seminole culture combines African-American spirituals, Indian fry-bread, and Tex-Mex cowboy culture. Their old religion was based in dream divination, and their old language combined West African, Native American, English, and Spanish. But these old ways have been dying along with the elders who practiced them, and young Mascogo and Black Seminoles have lost touch with a heritage which is not taught in school and which risks total assimilation into mainstream Mexican and U.S. culture. Filmed on both sides of the border, this video documents the complex history of people of African descent caught between national boundaries, and the efforts of their descendants to maintain their culture and instill a sense of pride in future generations of this warrior people.

[Note: the term, Mascogos, is the Mexican/Spanish equivalent to Muscogees, the tribal name of the the Seminole, Creek, Chactaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee, known as the Five Civilized Indian Nations –whose territory included what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. The Negroes, the Africans, the Maroons of Florida --their most famous marronage being the absconding from Stono Plantation in 1739-- took refugee and identity from their Indian companions and hosts in the British era of American history; and are still listed as Black Indians with the US Government and counted as members of those nations.]

[2] La Tercera Raiz/ The Third Root, director Rafael Rebollar Corona’s documentary focuses on the daily life and cultural traditions of Afro-Mestizos living in the Costa Chica region of Mexico’s Pacific coast. In Spanish with English subtitles. (Mexico, 2001, 30 min.)

[3] Correrias en el Monte [Forays into the Bush];

[4] Forgotten Roots, The (La Raiz olvidada) Get Details and Purchasing Info
Rafael Rebollar
Documentary 50 minutes 2001
With English subtitles

Mexico has always imagined itself a nation forged from the encounter between Spaniards and indigenous people in the colonial past. But there are roots that have been forgotten, if not deliberately erased. This impressively researched documentary, the first of a three part series, acknowledges and explores the history and influential cultural heritage of Africans in Mexico. It tells how African people were brought as slaves and servants to the conquistadors, and came to occupy a variety of places in Mexican colonial society, from exploited mine and plantation workers to wealthy landowners. Their story in Mexico is one of both resistance and acculturation, as some slaves rebelled against their masters and others had children with them to advance themselves socially. This video uses both historical documentation and the example of Mexico�s dazzling hybrid traditions to illustrate the deep and pervasive footprints left by African culture in Mexican culture and society. The crowning example is the city of Veracruz, that bustling port of the �Afro-Andalusian Caribbean,� with its bubbling hodgepodge of faces, races, and musical expressions that was the point of entry for the majority of the slaves to enter Mexico. But the video emphasizes that Africans were present throughout the country, and works towards a reconciliation with those African roots of Mexican culture that have been forgotten for too long.

The African Presence in México: From Yanga to the Present


For nearly 500 years the existence and influence of the African descendants in Mexico have been overlooked. The African Presence in México: Yanga to the Present traces how Africans---less than two per cent of colonial Mexico's (1521-1810) population---significantly enriched Mexican culture through their art, music, language, cuisine, and dance.
"African Presence in México invited Mexican-Americans and African-Americans to look at their identities in light of their shared histories in Mexico and the United States," said the Cultural Arts Developer. “The exhibition also allowed Americans to better understand the complexity of race issues in the U.S. and Mexico," she said.
The Spanish first brought Africans to Mexico in 1519 to labor in the agrarian and silver industries, under often brutal conditions. There were constant slave protests and runaways (cimarrones), who established settlements in the mountains of Orizaba.
In January 1609, Yanga, a runaway slave elder, led the cimarrones [maroons]to a successful resistance against a special army sent by the Spanish Crown to crush their actions. After several cimarrón victories the Spanish acquiesced to the slaves' demand for land and freedom. Yanga founded the first free African township in the Americas, San Lorenzo de los Negros, near Veracruz. It was renamed in his honor in the 1930s.
Slavery in Mexico was abolished in 1810 by Jose María Morelos y Pavón, leader of the Mexican War of Independence. As a mulatto (Spanish and African), Morelos was directly affected by Mexico's prejudices. Racial mixes were seen as undesirable by a society that aspired to purity of race and blood; i.e., Spanish only.
In 1992, as part of the 500th anniversary of the arrival (encuentro) of the Spanish in the Americas, the Mexican government officially acknowledged that the African culture represented la tercera raiz (the third root) of Mexican culture, with the Spanish and indigenous peoples.
The bilingual exhibition features paintings, prints, movie posters, photographs, sculpture, costumes, masks, and musical instruments. "It's a fascinating hybrid---a visual arts exhibition based on a cultural history," says co-curator Orantes. [Oakland Museum]
###






“The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present”
The DuSable Museum

Curated by Sangrario Cruz of the University of Veracruz and the National Museum of Mexican Art’s Visual Arts Director Cesareo Moreno, this exhibition through paintings, photographs, lithographs and historical texts, highlights the impact that Africans had on Mexican culture and examines the complexity of race, culture, politics, and social stratification. No exhibition has showcased the history, artistic expressions and practices of Afro-Mexicans in such broad scope as this one, which includes a comprehensive range of artwork from 18th Century Colonial caste paintings to contemporary artistic expressions. The African Presence in Mexico is also a bilingual exhibition that includes text panels, tours and various educational and public programming in both English and Spanish.
Organized and originally presented by the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, this traveling exhibition has made stops in New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, D.C., and California, as well as Monterrey and Veracruz, Mexico. The exhibition features important historical figures, such as Yanga, an African leader and founder of the first free African township in the Americas (January 6, 1609), and illuminates the contributions of Africans to the artistic, culinary, musical and cultural traditions of Mexican culture from the past through the present day. Featured in the exhibition are artists such as Rufino Tamayo, Elizabeth Catlett, Francisco Toledo, Maria Yampolski, Francisco Mora, and Afro-Mexicano artists; Ignacio Canela, Mario Guzman, Guillermo Vargas and Hermengildo Gonzalez.


AFRICAN PRESENCE IN MEXICO
SMITHSONIAN
WHAT IS A MEXICAN?
Miriam Jimenez Roman

Black people in Mexico? The looks of amazement and disbelief on the faces of first-time viewers of Tony Gleaton's photographs are eloquent testimony to the significance of these images. Particularly to those who have little or no knowledge about societies beyond the borders of the United States, these photographs are a revelation. They force us to rethink many of our preconceptions not only about our southern neighbor but more generally about issues such as race, ethnicity, culture, and national identity.

Not long ago, on a hot and humid July day, I rode with friends to the town of Yanga, in the state of Veracruz on Mexico's gulf coast. In recent years, Yanga has received considerable attention as one of the Americas' earliest "maroon communities": settlements founded by fugitive slaves. Originally known as San Lorenzo de los Negros, in 1932 the town was renamed for its founder, a rebellious Muslim man from what is now Nigeria. In 1609, after resisting recapture for 38 years, Yanga negotiated with the Spaniards to establish a free black community.

Today a recently erected statue of Yanga stands on the outskirts of the town, more a testimony to the persistence of a few Mexican anthropologists who "re-discovered" the place than to the historical memory of its founders' descendants. For as I strolled through the area and talked to the residents, and saw the evidence of an African past in their faces, I discovered that they have little more than amused curiosity about the outsiders who express interest in that past. Yanga's people have quite simply been living their lives as they always have, making the adjustments necessary in a changing world and giving little thought to an aspect of their history for which they are now being celebrated. The story of Yanga and his followers is remarkable for being so typical: The town's relative isolation is the reason for its founding and for its continued existence as a predominately black enclave. Fugitive slave communities were commonly established in difficult-to-reach areas in order to secure their inhabitants from recapture.

But their physical isolation has also led to their being ignored. Particularly since the Revolution (1910-29), the Yangas of Mexico--most found dispersed throughout the states of Veracruz on the gulf coast and Oaxaca and Guerrero south of Acapulco--have been out of sight and out of mind, generally considered unworthy of any special attention. Mexico's African presence has been relegated to an obscured slave past, pushed aside in the interest of a national identity based on a mixture of indigenous and European cultural mestizaje. In practice, this ideology of "racial democracy" favors the European presence; too often the nation's glorious indigenous past is reduced to folklore and ceremonial showcasing. But the handling of the African "third root" is even more dismissive.

There are notable exceptions to this lack of attention. The anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran's seminal works ("La Poblacion Negra de Mexico, 1519-1810." Mexico: Ediciones Fuente Cultural, 1946; and "Cuijla: Esbozo Etnografico de un Pueblo Negro." Veracruz, Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, 1989) remain among the most important on the subject. Doubtless influenced by the interest in Africans and their descendants in other parts of the world, during the past decade a small but significant group of Mexican intellectuals have begun focusing on black Mexicans. It is true that the state of Veracruz (and especially the port city of the same name) is generally recognized as having "black" people. In fact, there is a widespread tendency to identify all Mexicans who have distinctively "black" features as coming from Veracruz. In addition to its relatively well-known history as a major slave port, Veracruz received significant numbers of descendants of Africa from Haiti and Cuba during the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Africans and their descendants to the formation of Mexican society do not figure in the equation at all. Because they live as their neighbors live, carry out the same work, eat the same foods, and make the same music, it is assumed that blacks have assimilated into "Mexican" society. The truth of the matter is, they are Mexican society. The historical record offers compelling evidence that Africans and their descendants contributed enormously to the very formation of Mexican culture.

For all intents and purposes the biological, cultural, and material contributions of more than 200,000. Africans and their descendants to the formation of Mexican society do not figure in the equation at all. It is impossible to arrive at precise figures on the volume of enslaved Africans brought to Mexico or the rest of the Americas. Hungry for slaves and eager to avoid payment of duties, traders and buyers often resorted to smuggling. The 200,000 figure is generally recognized as a conservative estimate.

Because they live as their neighbors live, carry out the same work, eat the same foods, and make the same music, it is assumed that blacks have assimilated into "Mexican" society. The truth of the matter is, they are Mexican society. The historical record offers compelling evidence that Africans and their descendants contributed enormously to the very formation of Mexican culture.

When Yanga and his followers founded their settlement, the population of Mexico City consisted of approximately 36,000 Africans, 116,000 persons of African ancestry, and only 14,000 Europeans. The source of these figures is the census of 1646 of Mexico City, as reported by Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran in "La Poblacion Negra de Mexico" (p. 237). These approximate figures include as persons of African ancestry only those designated as "Afromestizos," in accordance with the caste-system definitions at the time. The census indicates that there were also more than a million indigenous peoples. In fact, such precise definitions were almost impossible to make, and it is highly probable that the categories "Euromestizos" and "Indomestizos" also included persons of African descent. Escaped slaves added to the overwhelming numbers in the cities, establishing communities in Oaxaca as early as 1523. Beyond their physical presence, Africans and their descendants interacted with indigenous and European peoples in forging nearly every aspect of society. Indeed, the states of Guerrero and Morelos bear the names of two men of African ancestry, heroes of the war of independence that made possible the founding of the republic of Mexico in 1821.

It is within this context that we must view Tony Gleaton's photographs. The people in these images, ignored in the past, now run the risk of being exoticized, of being brought forward to applaud their "Africanness" while ignoring their "Mexicanness." The faces of these children and grandmothers should remind us of the generations that preceded them. But we must not relegate them to history. As always, they remain active participants in their world. To understand the implications of the people of Yanga--and of Cuajinicuilapa, El Ciruelo, Corralero, and other like communities--we must go beyond physical appearance, cease determining the extent of Africa's influence simply by how much one "looks" African, and go forward to critically examine what indeed is Mexico and who are the Mexicans. So, yes, there are black people in Mexico. We may marvel at these relatively isolated communities that can still be found along the Pacific and gulf coasts. But of greater significance is recognizing the myriad forms that mark the African presence in Mexican culture, past and present, many of which remain to be discovered by people such as Tony Gleaton and ourselves and certainly by the Mexican people. ###






NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MEXICAN ARTS
http://www.nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org/af//africanpresence.html

Obama Kills Dead Fly Osama

I and other thinking persons have a strong suspicion Osama bin Laden died in 2001 from incurable diseases. The BBC reported a neighbor at his socalled mansion in Pakistan saw the USA video of Obama and said he knew the man as Akbar Khan, perhaps a double for Obama. After all, Obama's dead fly appears to have been dead since 2001, so why kill another dead fly except for political expediency, i.e., 2012 election or selection. What a diversion from the pervasive unemployment, homelessness and those suffering nothingness and dread from the white supremacy world of make believe, generated by the Monkey Mind Media. Dr. Nathan Hare teaches us the "Fictive theory," i.e., everything the white man says (and the black man) is fiction until proven to be fact.
--Marvin X



Top US Government Insider: Bin Laden Died In 2001, 9/11 A False Flag


Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under three different administrations Steve R. Pieczenik says he is prepared to tell a federal grand jury the name of a top general who told him directly 9/11 was a false flag attack



Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Top US government insider Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik, a man who held numerous different influential positions under three different Presidents and still works with the Defense Department, shockingly told The Alex Jones Show yesterday that Osama Bin Laden died in 2001 and that he was prepared to testify in front of a grand jury how a top general told him directly that 9/11 was a false flag inside job.

Pieczenik cannot be dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist”. He served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under three different administrations, Nixon, Ford and Carter, while also working under Reagan and Bush senior, and still works as a consultant for the Department of Defense. A former US Navy Captain, Pieczenik achieved two prestigious Harry C. Solomon Awards at the Harvard Medical School as he simultaneously completed a PhD at MIT.

Recruited by Lawrence Eagleburger as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Management, Pieczenik went on to develop, “the basic tenets for psychological warfare, counter terrorism, strategy and tactics for transcultural negotiations for the US State Department, military and intelligence communities and other agencies of the US Government,” while also developing foundational strategies for hostage rescue that were later employed around the world.

Pieczenik also served as a senior policy planner under Secretaries Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, George Schultz and James Baker and worked on George W. Bush’s election campaign against Al Gore. His record underscores the fact that he is one of the most deeply connected men in intelligence circles over the past three decades plus.

The character of Jack Ryan, who appears in many Tom Clancy novels and was also played by Harrison Ford in the popular 1992 movie Patriot Games, is also based on Steve Pieczenik.

Back in April 2002, over nine years ago, Pieczenik told the Alex Jones Show that Bin Laden had already been “dead for months,” and that the government was waiting for the most politically expedient time to roll out his corpse. Pieczenik would be in a position to know, having personally met Bin Laden and worked with him during the proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan back in the early 80′s.

Pieczenik said that Osama Bin Laden died in 2001, “Not because special forces had killed him, but because as a physician I had known that the CIA physicians had treated him and it was on the intelligence roster that he had marfan syndrome,” adding that the US government knew Bin Laden was dead before they invaded Afghanistan.

Marfan syndrome is a degenerative genetic disease for which there is no permanent cure. The illness severely shortens the life span of the sufferer.

“He died of marfan syndrome, Bush junior knew about it, the intelligence community knew about it,” said Pieczenik, noting how CIA physicians had visited Bin Laden in July 2001 at the American Hospital in Dubai.

“He was already very sick from marfan syndrome and he was already dying, so nobody had to kill him,” added Pieczenik, stating that Bin Laden died shortly after 9/11 in his Tora Bora cave complex.

“Did the intelligence community or the CIA doctor up this situation, the answer is yes, categorically yes,” said Pieczenik, referring to Sunday’s claim that Bin Laden was killed at his compound in Pakistan, adding, “This whole scenario where you see a bunch of people sitting there looking at a screen and they look as if they’re intense, that’s nonsense,” referring to the images released by the White House which claim to show Biden, Obama and Hillary Clinton watching the operation to kill Bin Laden live on a television screen.

“It’s a total make-up, make believe, we’re in an American theater of the absurd….why are we doing this again….nine years ago this man was already dead….why does the government repeatedly have to lie to the American people,” asked Pieczenik.

“Osama Bin Laden was totally dead, so there’s no way they could have attacked or confronted or killed Osama Bin laden,” said Pieczenik, joking that the only way it could have happened was if special forces had attacked a mortuary.

Pieczenik said that the decision to launch the hoax now was made because Obama had reached a low with plummeting approval ratings and the fact that the birther issue was blowing up in his face.

“He had to prove that he was more than American….he had to be aggressive,” said Pieczenik, adding that the farce was also a way of isolating Pakistan as a retaliation for intense opposition to the Predator drone program, which has killed hundreds of Pakistanis.

“This is orchestrated, I mean when you have people sitting around and watching a sitcom, basically the operations center of the White House, and you have a president coming out almost zombie-like telling you they just killed Osama Bin Laden who was already dead nine years ago,” said Pieczenik, calling the episode, “the greatest falsehood I’ve ever heard, I mean it was absurd.”

Dismissing the government’s account of the assassination of Bin Laden as a “sick joke” on the American people, Pieczenik said, “They are so desperate to make Obama viable, to negate the fact that he may not have been born here, any questions about his background, any irregularities about his background, to make him look assertive….to re-elect this president so the American public can be duped once again.”

Pieczenik’s assertion that Bin Laden died almost ten years ago is echoed by numerous intelligence professionals as well as heads of state across the world.

Bin Laden, “Was used in the same way that 9/11 was used to mobilize the emotions and feelings of the American people in order to go to a war that had to be justified through a narrative that Bush junior created and Cheney created about the world of terrorism,” stated Pieczenik.

During his interview with the Alex Jones Show yesterday, Pieczenik also asserted he was directly told by a prominent general that 9/11 was a stand down and a false flag operation, and that he is prepared to go to a grand jury to reveal the general’s name.

“They ran the attacks,” said Pieczenik, naming Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and Condoleezza Rice amongst others as having been directly involved.

“It was called a stand down, a false flag operation in order to mobilize the American public under false pretenses….it was told to me even by the general on the staff of Wolfowitz – I will go in front of a federal committee and swear on perjury who the name was of the individual so that we can break it open,” said Pieczenik, adding that he was “furious” and “knew it had happened”.

“I taught stand down and false flag operations at the national war college, I’ve taught it with all my operatives so I knew exactly what was done to the American public,” he added.

Pieczenik re-iterated that he was perfectly willing to reveal the name of the general who told him 9/11 was an inside job in a federal court, “so that we can unravel this thing legally, not with the stupid 9/11 Commission that was absurd.”

Pieczenik explained that he was not a liberal, a conservative or a tea party member, merely an American who is deeply concerned about the direction in which his country is heading.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show

Monkey Mind Media and World of Make Believe: Obama Osama

Staged: White House “Situation Room” Photos Part Of Bin Laden Fable






Dramatic images that media claimed represented Obama and Clinton watching live assassination of Bin Laden revealed to be a PR stunt
Paul Joseph WatsonPrison Planet.comThursday, May 5, 2011

In addition to images of President Obama’s address to the American public on Sunday night, it has emerged that the dramatic photos of Obama, Biden, Hillary Clinton and members of the White House security team watching the assassination of Bin Laden “live” were in fact completely staged, casting further doubt on the ever-changing official account of the operation.

On Tuesday, the White House released provocative images that purported to show, “US President Barack Obama watching live footage of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.”
In one particularly dramatic photo, Hillary Clinton is seen with her hand anxiously clasped over her mouth as if reacting to a crucial event. Other photos show Obama and his staff with stern faces as they discuss the operation while it unfolds.

The photos were described by many as having “historical significance,” forming a “captivating” record of Obama’s greatest success and being the “defining moment” of his Presidency.
We were also told by the media that, “The leader of the free world saw the terror chief shot in the left eye.”

“US president Barack Obama along with his high-level team, watched live coverage in the White House, as the commandos gunned down the world’s most wanted terrorist Osama Bin Laden Via a video camera fixed to the helmet of a US Navy Seal,” it was also reported.

US chief counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan claimed that the head cameras that fed audio and video back to the White House, allowed Obama and his staff to track the operation “on an ongoing basis”.

But the claims have been proven to be completely fraudulent.

Alongside the crumbling official narrative of the operation to kill Bin Laden, it has emerged that Obama, Clinton and their staff saw virtually nothing whatsoever of the mission that allegedly led to the assassination of Bin Laden, because according to CIA director Leon Panetta, there was a 25 minute blackout of the live feed which was cut off before the US Navy SEALS even entered the building.

“A photograph released by the White House appeared to show the President and his aides in the situation room watching the action as it unfolded. In fact they had little knowledge of what was happening in the compound,” reports the London Telegraph.

In an interview with PBS, Mr Panetta said: “Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.

The notion that Obama “saw the terror chief shot in the left eye” live on video is a total fabrication. At best, the photos were cynically misrepresented by the White House and the mainstream media, at worst, they were completely staged to add a contrived dramatic spin to the unfolding wall-to-wall press coverage of the Bin Laden fable, which is becoming more convoluted with each passing day.

The key image that clearly indicates the photos were staged is the shot of Hillary Clinton with her hand over her mouth. Clinton looks shocked as if she has witnessed something disturbing, obviously implying that she is watching a live shootout or someone being assassinated, when in fact she saw nothing of the kind because the feed was cut before the SEALS entered the compound.

The White House was careful to not describe this image as representing the moments during which the SEALS stormed the building, but the implication was clear, and the establishment media did the work for them, reporting that the picture depicted Obama and Clinton, “watching intently as the raid takes place,” another total falsehood.

Former top spymaster Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik, a man who worked under five different US Presidents, has been proven correct in his assertion that the photos were “Nonsense….total make-up, make believe,” and proof that Americans were being held captive to a “theater of the absurd”.

The entire account of the Bin Laden raid is fast turning into a Jerry Bruckheimer-style fictional made for TV movie, just as the Jessica Lynch “rescue” was scripted for public consumption, solely to elicit contrived patriotism and pro-war sentiment amongst the American people.

In addition to the dubious situation room pictures, it has also emerged that the images of Barack Obama that appeared on Monday morning’s newspapers after he had announced the death of Bin Laden the previous night were also completely staged.

“While the photo that ran on many newspapers and websites the next morning appeared as if it were taken during Obama’s address to the nation the night before, it was actually the result of an elaborate post-speech production,” reports the International Business Times.

“As President Obama continued his nine-minute address in front of just one main network camera, the photographers were held outside the room by staff and asked to remain completely silent,” Reuters photographer Jason Reed explained in his blog.

“Once Obama was off the air, we were escorted in front of that teleprompter and the President then re-enacted the walk-out and first 30 seconds of the statement for us.”

The staging of the Obama speech photo is embarrassing, but the staging of the situation room photos, which were heavily promoted by the establishment media, falsely presented as evidence that Obama, Biden and Clinton saw the assassination of Osama live, and used by the White House to lend credence to the fairytale they were busily scripting, are damning.

We truly have entered the “theater of the absurd” when, even as the narrative of the Bin Laden fable crashes and burns, the establishment media that helped manufacture this work of fiction are still claiming that anyone who even questions the blaring inconsistencies of the official account are merely conspiracy theorists engaging in “black helicopter fantasies”.
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

Revolution Against Fear

Revolution Against Fear

"The only thing to fear is fear itself."--President Roosevelt

No human progress is possible while people are paralyzed by fear. Fear is the great monster of the mind that prevents people from standing against oppression. Once the great monster fear is cut off, we see people can stand tall in the face of any challenge, whether from the guns of state terror, the tanks, police, jails, prisons and ultimately death. Overcoming the fear of death is the ultimate challenge of man. Once a man or woman accepts that his/her life and death are all for God, transcending the self, fear is discarded into the dustbin of history.

We see this occurring in North Africa and the Middle East at this hour. The people have cast off the illusion of fear and are standing tall against oppression from regimes long supported by American Imperialism. America has been the major arms supplier, the guns, bullets, poison gas, equipment for torture chambers and dungeons that were established to allow the most wicked and repressive regimes to flourish for the last forty years.

Let us be clear that America has a history of oppressing its own citizens, of filling their bodies and minds with fear, of reducing them from Kunta Kinte to Toby en mass. We have yet to learn the true story of resistance to the American slave system by North American Africans, who mastered fear during three centuries of chattel enslavement, not recognized as humans or citizens. And yet from within the slave system, North American African resisted by any means necessary, ultimately taking up arms in the Civil War, only to be betrayed by those who won the war and those who were defeated, especially when the 200,000 African soldiers were disarmed.

It is this disarming that allowed fear to return in the from of state terror in the guise of the KKK, the lynchings, virtual slave labor and disenfranchisement during the short lived Reconstruction.

Imagine, for a time the people who were banned from learning to read and write, upon emancipation exercised a thirst for learning so great the children had to be beaten out of the classroom and made to go home. Today we have flipped the script, the children must be beaten or taken to juvenile hall for refusing to attend school. School districts have gone broke because their daily attendance was so low they could not qualify to fund their budgets.

How did the fear of knowledge become pervasive? How did it become a hip fad to be ignut? We need only examine the lives of men who read books and not only transformed their lives but the lives of their people, e.g., Fredrick Douglass, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver. These men cast aside their fears, stood up and made their people stand. Imagine the eternal words of Harriet Tubman, "I could have freed more slaves if they had known they were slaves."

We see here the need for the slave system, today the neo-slave system, to keep people in ignorance and fear. The slave system rules through ignorance and fear. The Civil Rights movement was on the road to success once the people in the South cast off their fears, especially the fear of death, the fear of jail, prison and retaliation.

The 2.4 million people in US jails and prisons are special examples of the fearless. Most people who commit crimes are somewhat fearless, otherwise they would not take penitentiary chances, as they say. Those addicted to fear may be those who decide to hold down a job, to never consider economic independence, until of late when it is crystal clear the job for life is a myth.

We see a college education is no guarantee of a job. Our children will thus need to cast away their fears to configure a fair market system of economic justice. Free market capitalism is exhausted, surely America and her gang of global bandits are in their last days before being rounded up and divested of their ill gotten gains.

By what right should 400 people possess the wealth equal to 150 million? There must be a redistribution of the wealth stolen from the deaf, dumb and blind, yes, those robbed and left half dead on the roadside, those who are victims of American capital accumulation since the beginning of the slave system, i.e., the founding of this nation.

And yet the greatest robbery is not what occurred yesterday, but the robbery of the present global finance bandits who have ripped off the people with their pyramid schemes and sub prime loan scams that stole trillions from people and nations, since the blood suckers of the poor care nothing about people or nations.

The jobless and homeless of today will not rise from this condition until they cast away all fears and seize the means of production and the housing they need. Every human being needs a job and a dwelling. There is no mystery about the human right to a job and a place to stay.

Every human being should have a home with a life estate. This is the true and final solution to homelessness. The home with a life estate cannot be sold or transferred, thus a person will become free of the anxiety of homelessness. And then we consider the reality that all persons need a way to earn money to survive and thrive.

A society that cannot provide its people with economic security shall have no national security, for it is a failed society, a society in chaos, such as we see in America today. There are almost three million people in prison, mostly due to economic crimes, crimes of necessity.

And yet many of these criminals are fearless, some have the very creative minds we need to address the issues of society. And yet they are locked down, many for the most trivial offences, 80% were drug addicted at the time of their arrests and perhaps 50% have severe mental health issues, so what we have in American prisons and jails are drug addicts and the mentally ill or the dual diagnosed.

Still, we have seen that some of our greatest minds came from prison, recall Malcolm, George Jackson, Eldridge, Tookie. Even today we have millions of fearless minds locked down, e.g. Ruchell McGee, and so many other men and women, not to mention our greatest mind on death row, Mumia Abu Jamal. If a man can be productive as Mumia has been on death row, what excuse do we have out here on the big yard?

As Amiri Baraka asked, "Is it difficult for you?" And so I ask, is it difficult for you out here on the big yard? I especially ask the people of the Bay Area who have the legacy of the Black Panther Party who taught one essential lesson which was to discard our fears and stand tall in the face of oppression, is it difficult for you? I say smash your fear of the police, politicians, blood sucking merchants who refuse to hire you yet you do not protest. Challenge the oil and gasoline bandits who reap quarterly profits in the billions by manipulating the markets. But no, you won't dare confront Shell, Mobil, Exxon, Chevron, but you want to kill a brother who jumps ahead of you in the line at the gas station.

It is time to be informed and fearless. Use your cell phone to be informed, Google words you don't understand rather than spend the entire day asking your mate, "Where you at?" Ask yourself where your mind is at, where is your heart and soul at? Where is the fearlessness of your ancestors at?

--Marvin X

5/5/11

Freedom Theatre in Jenin, Occupied Palestine, Director Assassinated

The recent murder of Juliano Mer-Khamisby demostrates the price artists must pay to advance the cultural revolution among the Palestinian people. What is true for you is true for me, thus artists everywhere must pay whatever price is necessary to advance the cultural revolution that will propel the liberation struggle. The artist must be on the frontline of struggle with his heart, mind, talent, body and soul. Paul Robeson told us the artist must decide to be the artistic freedom fighter or a collaborator with oppression, to be a monkey, donkey and tool of imperialism. Juliano's death is not lighter than a feather but higher than Mount Tai!

--Marvin X (aka, El Muhajir)

Murdered: Juliano Mer-Khamisby:

Director of Jenin's Freedom Theatre

date: 2011-04-07


On Tuesday 4th April 2011, our friend, teacher and leader, Juliano Mer Khamis was murdered by an unknown enemy of freedom and culture. All of us at The Freedom Theatre would like to express our deep condolences to the family of Juliano in this devastating time. Juliano was a loving father and husband, an inspirational teacher and leader, and a friend to many.

Just as The Freedom Theatre was built on the inspiration and legacy of Arna, his mother, so will its future work be built on the legacy of Juliano. It will carry on his message to promote freedom – not only for a nation but for each human being. We are mourning, but we will continue our resistance through art, continue our struggle, continue to do our better than best. As Juliano would say: The Revolution must go on!

Please support us in our continuing struggle for freedom and justice!

--The Freedom Theatre staff and students

Juliano Mer Khamis
4 Apr 04 2011

by Anthony Alessandrini

[Juliano Mer Khamis. Image by Alex Rozkovsky/AP]

Jadaliyya is tremendously saddened to report the murder of Juliano Mer Khamis earlier today. Juliano, 52, who was the Artistic Director of The Jenin Freedom Theater and the co-director of the award-winning documentary Arna’s Children, was shot by unknown assailants in Jenin as he was leaving the theater. We offer our deepest condolences to his family, his friends, and all who worked with him and loved him.

Juliano was born in Nazareth in 1958. He was the son of Saliba Khamis, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who was at one time the secretary of the Israeli Communist Party, and Arna Mer Khamis, a Jewish Israeli who spent her youth in the Palmach but became an anti-Zionist activist and a fearless fighter for peace, justice, and human rights.

In interviews, Juliano would tell a story that marked the “racial lunacy” into which he was born: his mother went into labor while taking part in a protest against the imposition of martial law on Palestinian villages in Israel. She was rushed to the hospital, "but the doctors refused to stitch her and she nearly bled to death," he said. "They knew she was married to an Arab."

Growing up, Juliano for a time adopted his Jewish maternal name and joined an elite fighting unit of the IDF. "For a whole year my father wouldn't talk to me. He simply kept silent," he told an interviewer. But in 1978, while stationed in Jenin, he refused an order to forcibly remove an elderly Palestinian man from a car and ended up in a fight with his commanding officer. He was imprisoned for a few weeks and then left the army.

Ultimately, he came to identify himself, as he put it in 2009, by stating: "I am 100 percent Palestinian and 100 percent Jewish."

He worked extensively as an actor in film, television, and stage, beginning in the 1980s; during this time, he also began to work with his mother on the original Freedom Theater project in Jenin. Funded in part by the prize money that Arna Mer Khamis was awarded when she won the Alternative Nobel Prize, the theater was part of a larger project, “Care and Learning,” set up by Arna and a number of volunteers in the Jenin Refugee Camp. She was the vision behind the project until her death in 1994.

In 2003, Juliano collaborated with Daniel Daniel to produce and direct the documentary Arna’s Children. The film lovingly documented the work of The Freedom Theater, and the lives of the children from Jenin who participated in the plays and theater workshops. The film is also a document of the horrific destruction visited upon the Jenin Refugee Camp when it was invaded by Israeli forces in April 2002, and an account of the Battle of Jenin fought against this invasion. Following the lives and deaths of the young people who participated in The Freedom Theater, as well as the destruction of the theater itself in the Israeli invasion, the film was regarded by many as a masterpiece, and was awarded the Best Documentary Feature prize at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival.

In the words of one reviewer, the film is “a work of art, because it was made with a trembling hand, with the stammer of someone who does not know whom to mourn most: his mother, the boys from the Jenin camp or the trampled hopes of people yearning to be free."

It is also a film made with tremendous courage and honesty, two virtures that were the trademark of Juliano’s art. Elias Khoury wrote of Arna’s Children: “It was not an ordinary film. I do not know from where Juliano drew the courage and bravery to create this masterpiece, which appeared before my eyes as a testimony stronger than both life and death together.”

The reaction to Arna’s Children helped lead to the possibility of rebuilding and expanding The Freedom Theater in Jenin. In 2006, the theater opened its doors, and since then, it has offered a wide variety of workshops and other opportunities to young people in the camp, along with training in filmmaking, and the first Acting School in Palestine was opened at The Freedom Theater in 2008.

The theater has also produced a number of plays, including Men in the Sun and Animal Farm. The theater’s most recent production, Alice in Wonderland, co-directed by Juliano, opened in January to standing-room-only crowds and rave reviews.

All this constitutes a rare legacy, achieved through a tremendous collective effort, and Juliano was the visionary behind it all.

Juliano Mer Khamis was a fearless artist, and a fearless human being. Arna’s Children and The Freedom Theater are only the two most visible parts of his legacy, a legacy that bespeaks the role artistic creation can play even amidst the most horrible depths of injustice and suffering.

“The Freedom Theatre will provide the children of the camp a tranquil environment to express themselves and create,” he wrote, describing the vision of the theater in 2006. To imagine the possibility of opening up a space of tranquility, of expression, and thus of possibility, in Jenin Refugee Camp, whose name has become synonymous with the most vicious and destructive brutality of the occupation, might be seen as madness. Its very existence is a testament to the power of the artistic tradition that Juliano embodied with such beauty and power.

In Arna’s Children, Juliano documented, tenderly and fearlessly, the many ways that martyrdom comes to the young artists of Jenin camp. He showed us that every life lost in Jenin needed to be seen and understood as an unspeakable tragedy worthy of our remembrance. As Khoury wrote, so movingly, on the establishment of The Freedom Theater in Jenin: “It stands on ground laid down by the child martyrs, who found that the meaning they learned in Arna’s theatre led them in their early youth to create the epic of Jenin Refugee Camp, through its heroic resistance in 2002.

These are the children who we watched in the film Arna’s Children, dying and their blood covering their dream of becoming actors and artists. They are the true owners of The Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp.” Juliano has joined them. The loss of his voice is an irreplaceable one.

Arna’s Children can be purchased on DVD here, with all proceeds donated to The Freedom Theater in Jenin. For other ways to support The Freedom Theater, see here.
Juliano's family has issued a very moving statement that is a testament to his life and work: it can be found here.

Obama, Osama and the War Mongers Club

OBAMA, SARKOZY, CAMERON

SHOULD STEP DOWN

IF QADDAFI STEPS DOWN

by

PROFESSOR SAM HAMOD, PH.D

LET ME BE BLUNT:

1. IF QADDAFI IS REQUIRED TO STEP DOWN, THEN THE 4 WARMONGERS WHO STARTED THIS TERRIBLE WAR, OBAMA, SARKOZY, CAMERON AND HAGUE SHOULD STEP DOWN AND ALSO GO INTO EXILE.

2. REPARATIONS MUST BE PAID BY THE USA, FRANCE AND THE UK TO THE LIBYAN ARAB REPUBLIC FOR THE DAMAGE AND THE LIVES THEY TOOK IN THEIR KILING AND ILLGAL WARFARE.

3. ALL OF THESE WARMONGERS SHOULD BE TRIED BY THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE FOR WAR CRIMES AGAINST LIBYA AND OTHER COUNTRIES, BUT ESPECIALLY AGAINST LIBYA.IF THIS IS NOT DONE, THEN THERE IS NO JUSTICE IN THE WORLD, AND THE USA, UK, FRANCE, AND ITALY SHOULD ALL BE CENSURED BY THE UN AND TAKEN OFF THE "SECURITY COUNCIL" BECAUSE THE ARE WARMONGERING NATIONS, AND ALL THESE "LEADERS" ARE CRIMINALS OF THE WORST SORT; THEY ARE NOT WORTHY OF LEADERSHIP, AND THEY ARE A DETRIMENT TO THEIR OWN NATION AND THEIR OWN PEOPLE.THE WEST, LED BY THE USA, UK, FRANCE AND OTHERS SHOULD NO LONGER TALK ABOUT "JUSTICE" "PEACE" AND "DEMOCRACY," BECAUSE THEY DO NOT PRACTICE THE ABOVE IN THE WORLD OR IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY.

PROFESSOR SAM HAMOD, PH.D

5.3.11

Paul Cobb and Marvin X

Oakland Post Publisher Paul Cobb and author Marvin X at 14th and Broadway, across the street from Academy of da Corner, in front of Rite Aid.

Paul and Marvin grew up together in West Oakland. Paul knows more about Marvin's dad, Owendell Jackmon, a florist, than Marvin. Another brother, Henry Winston, says Mr. Jackmon was his mentor and he holds Marvin's dad in the highest esteem. Mr. Jackmon made his transition at 89 in 1989. He was born in 1900 and particpated in WWI. He was a Race man who was conscious of Marcus Garvey. In Oakland, he was a member of various organizations, including The Men of Tomorrow, Elks, American Legion, et al. Mr. Jackmon was a member of Downs Memorial Methodist Church. Marvin's classic play Flowers for the Trashman deals with the father/son relationship. When the Drama Department at San Franscisco State University produced the play while Marvin was an undergrad, his father attended a performance but wasn't too happy with his son's depiction.

Before moving to Oakland, the Jackmons lived in Fresno. Marvin and his mother, Marian Murrill Jackmon were born in Fowler, nine miles south of Fresno. His parents published the Fresno Voice, possibly the first black newspaper in the Central Valley. They also had a real estate business and sold many blacks their first home after WWII.

See Marvin's autobiography, Somethin' Proper, Black Bird Press, 1998.

photo Walter Riley, Esq.

Somethin' Proper: The Life and Times of a North American African Poet

book review

African American Review, Spring, 2001

by Julius E. Thompson

It tells the story of the most important Muslim poet to appear in the United States during the civil rights era....Marvin X (Marvin E. Jackmon) [El Muhajir]. Somethin' Proper: The Life and Times of a North American African Poet. Castro Valley, CA: Black Bird P, 1998. 278 pp. $29.95.

Marvin X's autobiography Somethin' Proper is one of the most significant works to come out of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It tells the story of perhaps the most important African American Muslim poet to appear in the United States during the Civil Rights era. The book opens with an introduction by scholar Nathan Hare, a key figure in the Black Studies Movement of the period. Marvin X then takes center stage with an exploration of his life's story, juxtaposed with the rapidly changing events and movements of contemporary history: the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement, the Black Power Movement, the growth of Islam in America, and especially the influence of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, and the series of challenges facing black people in recent decades.

Marvin X was born Marvin E. Jackmon in Fowler, California, on May 29, 1944, and grew up in West Fresno and West Oakland, California. His early education was completed in these cities, and he later attended Oakland City College (Merritt) and San Francisco State University, where he was awarded a B.A. and an M.A. in English.

He emerged as an important new poetic voice among California black poets in the late 1960s, and wrote for several of the key Black Arts Movement journals of the period, including the Journal of Black Poetry, Soulbook, Black Dialogue, Black Theatre magazine, Black Scholar, Black World, and Muhammad Speaks.

He was also a key playwright of the era, working with Ed Bullins in organizing the Black Arts West Theatre in San Francisco, 1966, and in founding the Black House, also in San Francisco, with Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver, and Ethna Wyatt, 1967.

He also worked with Bullins at the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, 1968. During the last forty years, Marvin X has taught Black Studies, literature, drama, and English at Fresno State University, the University of California, Berkeley and San Diego, the University of Nevada, Reno, San Francisco State University, Mills College, and Merritt and Laney Colleges in Oakland, California.

His very active career is also reflected in a rapid-moving life style. This fact is documented by the author in twenty chapters in Somethin' Proper, followed by an appendix, which captures the life and death of Huey Newton. Marvin X was a busy man during the 1960s and 1970s. He was a Black Muslim, an associate of the key leaders of the Black Panther Party (Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver), an anti-Vietnam War protester (he went into exile in Canada, Mexico City and later in Central America, rather than be drafted into the United States Army), and an outspoken critic of American economic, social, and cultural discrimination of African Americans at home, and of Third World peoples abroad.

This theme is reflected in one of his most famous poems of the period, "Burn, Baby Burn" on the 1965 Watts Riot:

Tired, sick and tired.

Tired of being sick and tired.

Lost,

lost inthe wilderness of white America.

Are the masses asses?

Cool, said the master

To the slave, "No problem,

Don't rob and steal, I'll Be your driving wheel."

Cool.

And he wheeled us into350 years of BlackMadness--

to hog guts, Conked hair, quo vadis

Bleaching cream, Uncle Thomas,

to WattsTo the streets, to theKillllllllll ........

Boommmmm ............

2 honkeys gone.

Motherfuck the police

And Parker's sister too

Burn, baby, burn*******

Cook outta sight*******

Fineburgs,

wineburgs,

Safeway,

noway,

burn .....Baby, burn

Somethin' Proper also reveals Marvin X's family life, marriages, children, and friends, and notes the conflicts which he has experienced across the years with individuals, organizations, and governments. He writes in a style which captures the essence of black language, folklore, and culture in the United States, with an upscale urban beat!

Marvin X notes the high and low points in his own life and that of his associates. Most potent is his analysis of the drug situation in this country, and its relationship to and impact upon the black struggle. He calls for change and reform in this area, stressing the need for continued black struggle to overcome the age-old problems of discrimination, racism, and oppression in America.

Marvin X remains an active writer today. His body of work includes Fly to Allah (1969); Black Man Listen (1969), a key work in Dudley Randall's catalogue at Broadside Press; Woman, Man's Best Friend (1973); and a play, One Day in the Life, most recently produced in 1997 in Brooklyn and Newark, New Jersey.

His most recent books of poetry are Love and War (1995), Land of My Daughters, poems, 2005.He remains a very interesting voice from the Black Arts Movement, continuing to write and to challenge contemporary readers to think and to act, and to assess the past, the present, and the future.

COPYRIGHT 2001 African American Review

COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group

Marvin appears in the recent literary anthology Black California, Heyday Books, Berkeley, 2011. He was Guest Editor of the Journal of Pan African Studies Poetry Issue, 2011. Marvin is editing an anthology of writings dedicated to the memory of assassinated Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey.

On May 14, Marvin X will receive the Inspired Artist Award at the Paramount Theatre.

Osama from the Street

Obama from the Street or the Mack God

The Meaning of Osama bin Laden from a Street Perspective

In the language of the street, Osama bin Laden checked the white man. He put traps in the White man's path, allowing us to breathe another day while the white man focused on catching Obama, just as the Black Panther Party took pressure off the Negro people by having the police focus on the Black Panthers as the main threat to the national security of the United States. Can you imagine, some little Negroes with pistols and shotguns are able to challenge the might of the trillion dollar military industrial complex called America!

This is a joke of the highest order and should receive an award at the coming Comedy Concert at Oakland's Paramount Theatre on May 14.

What we must learn from Osama is the interconnectedness of all things, especially in the Global Village. On the highest level of socalled civilization, there are only those who rule and those who are ruled. Such ideological and religious personas do not matter in the least, for they all go to the same banks to bankroll their iniquities. It doesn't matter if they are Muslim, Christian, Democrat, Republican, Socialist, Communist, Gay, Lesbian. Only their interests matter, their narrow minded ideological concerns, all else can be sacrificed, sometimes to the highest bidder.

In the street, there is little distinction from the cops and robbers, they actually work together to keep crime alive. What would the police do with a society free of crime? What would the jailers and social workers, probation, parole officers do?

Osama has, beyond his wildest imagination, helped usher in another Age of Man, ultimately helping the downtrodden of humanity get the courage to stand up in the face of oppression.

His main contribution was helping overcoming the fear of death. The suicide bombers gave us ample evidence death is no matter, that a greater life awaits us, if we only rid ourselves of the fear of death, if only we will invoke the dictum my life and my death are all for Allah.

In the Mack God philosophy, death is no matter, except as the price of justice. For whatever twisted ideological perspective he originated, whether Sunni or some weird combination thereof, Osama gave the West its greatest challenge yet.

But in the end the West shall face its greatest challenge as Baraka told us, "In the end the Negro will be the terrorist." Thus forget about Osama bin Ladan and consentrate on the most oppressed sector of American society. They shall and must be liberated by any means necessary, although we suggest by the most scientific means possible.

The American wage slaves can join them or stand on the sidelines, it doesn't matter. The time has come for the liberation of the North American Africans, and America may be destroyed in the process. Who gives a damn?

--Marvin X

4/1/11

Imperialist Running Dog Obama Catches Osama

Al Jazeera English: Live Stream - Watch Now - Al Jazeera English


On the Death of Osama bin Laden

Well, well, well, as election season begins, Obama has a feather in his cap, the body of Osama, the most wanted man in American history. Thus the Obama Drama continues for the hoodwinking of those addicted to the world of make believe. As we imagined, Osama was living not in some mountain cave, but in a mansion inside Islamabad, Pakistan, of course whereabouts long known by the Pakistani Intelligence and the CIA.

For better or worse, he was a character created by America, first to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan, then to be the bogeyman of the Global fascists in the American military, finance, corporate, univeristy complex of white supremacy institutions that shall now proceed to reinstitute chattel slavery in America in the form of wage slavery, with little or no benefits for the workers who have yet do not have the boldness to seize the means of production and institute a People's Republic Ruled by the Consent of the Governed. I refer them to the poem If We Must Die by Black Renaissance poet Claude Mckay. Hopefully this will get their nuts out of the sand and/or vaginas. A coward's death is lighter than a feather, the warrior's death is higher than Mount Tai.

No more jobs for life, no job amenities, no free health insurance, no social security. Your life is a commodity in the free market economy. It shall make money off you at every turn, no free lunches, no free rides, not even to the cemetary, better a cremation in the nomadic European tradition so accustomed by the North American Africans addicted to white supremacy world of make believe perpetuated by the Monkey Mind Media.

Osama Bin Laden was an American creation, with full support of Saudi Arabia, how else could nine of the sixteen highjackers learn to fly but not how to land and while training in America? How else could the Bin Laden fly out of America on 9/11 when no other planes could fly? Study the House of Saud and the House of Bush!

And what is Barack Obama but an extention of the Bush White Supremacy Mythology, except in black face. When he imposes a No-fly Zone over the Gaza Consentration Camp, I will support him, until then, I will ride his ass like Roy Rogers on Trigger.

Black ain't black

white ain't white

beware the day

beware the night.

--Marvin X