Photo Essay:: Danny Glover and Marvin X at SF Anti-War Rally, 2003, photos by Kamau Amen Ra

From the Marvin X Archives: Photo Essay by Kamau Amen Ra of Danny Glover and Marvin X at San Francisco Anti-war Rally, 2003.

Danny and Marvin were students at San Francisco State University during the 60s. Danny later performed at Marvin X's Black Arts West Theatre in the Fillmore, 1966.

Youth Violence and Black Classical Music

Note the white makeup on Nina to make her more acceptable to the "American" audience on the Ed Sullivan Show, 1960. America did the same to Nat King Cole when he had the first black TV show. He was forced to wear the same white make up.






Youth Violence and Black Classical Musical
At this past weekend's San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Festival, many persons mentioned to me how peaceful it was, none of the incidents of gang banging that occurred during the Juneteenth Festival, even with a heavy police presence. We noted the police are simply another gang under the color of law, so the youth have no respect for them thus they commit acts of chaos in their presence.

The Jazz Festival was, again, peaceful. I heard of no reports of youth madness, although youth were present. I had a little incident with a youth who getting people to sign petitions. When he asked me to sign and I told him to get back with me because I was just setting up and neeed to get my mind in order. The youth told me I had a bad attitude, to which I responded, yes, I am a nigguh with an attitude. He said he was from New York and Newark and was down with blackness and I was reactionary, I assume, because I didn't sign his petition fast enough. He shouted at me his African names and told me I didn't know nothing about Africa and nothing else. The conversation ended when I told him I was in Africa, right here in the Fillmore. He called me a real nigguh and I concurred.

But back to violence and music. Sun Ra taught me armies march to music, and of course in the African tradition of New Orleans, there are funeral marches with music. We know Jazz or Black Classical music appeals to the mind, in particular, as well as the soul and body. Throughout the day a New Orleans band passed by with that second line joyful music that one is forced to join the line or move the body.

But essentially Jazz/BCM soothes the mind, or in the 60s tradition, challenges the mind with sounds smashing traditional white supremacy music. It can be war music or the music of peace and meditation so much needed today, well, we are war today as well.

Sadly, much of hip hop music negatively affects the central nervous system with robotic nursery rhymes and beats that indeed, put people to "sleep" rather than touch their higher consciousness, especially the genre of reactionary so called gangsta rap, the bitch, ho, motherfucker/fatherfucker variety.

Whereas Jazz/BCM revolutionized the people of the 60s,i.e. Coltrane, Miles, Pharaoh Sanders, Archie Shepp, Milford Graves, Nina Simone, Sun Ra, the reactionary rap music has a history of violence at concerts and in the hood, generally, for such music affects our subconscious mind. Young Negroes move to a beat without any music, programmed like Pavlov's dog, mix in mind altering drugs and you have a volatile potent package of poison ready to kill.

This is why I say we must not only pass the tone test when stopped by the police but with each other, especially when encountering youth. We don't know how many blunts a youth may have smoked before he encountered us. The youth taking signatures told me he might whup my ass, OG. Now you know he had to be loaded because he ain't hardly gonna kick my ass, he may kill me but I ain't hardly taking no ass whuppin from little snotty nose fathterness boys who hate me because I represent their long lost daddy.

As per the festival, yes, the music helped keep the peace. Youth, for the most part, don't relate to the music. But there's another reason for the peace: white people. White people flooded Fillmore Street for the festival as per usual. For that matter, white people have invaded the Fillmore District with gentrification, so no matter how violent youth may be, they ain't messing with no white people, they scared to death of white people, plus they know if they harm them, they can be charged with hate crimes or making terrorist threats. As I noted, they fought each other at Juneteenth in front of the police without arrest.

Music can heal you or kill you. For sure, we need healing music today, music that is therapeutic to mind and community. We need to hear real live positive music throughout the hood. How ironic when I lived in Seattle, Jazz/BCM was played everywhere, even in the elevators at shopping centers, it was Jazz. This is music for higher consciousness and sanity in a world where music is programmed to deconstruct and destroy the mind not construct it.

On the positive, the conscious rappers have indeed aligned themselves with Jazz/BCM, producing music with poet Amiri Baraka and others, performing with Trombone Shorty and other noted Jazz musicians. Once youth detox from destructive sounds, they will do more than sample Jazz, they will love it for it is their heritage, part of their DNA. Jazz/BCM is a thinking man's/woman's music, and the Lord knows we are in the time when hard thinking is needed. Life is a thinking man's/woman's game.

Again, the music can kill us or heal us. Sun Ra worked at my Black Educational Theatre during 1972, composing music for Take Care of Business, the musical version of Flowers for the Trashman. When my driver had a mental breakdown, Sun Ra visited him in the hospital, leaving him several albums. My driver was soon greatly improved and deeply appreciated Sun Ra for visiting him and leaving the albums.
--Marvin X
7/5/11

What is African American Studies?

From: yusufnuruddin@yahoo.com

Available Now
For price info and copies please contact
zendive@aol.com

Special Issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy:

What Is African American Studies,Its Focus, and Future?

Edited by John H.
McClendon III and Yusuf Nuruddin


Preface

Introduction by John H. McClendon III

Articles

John H.
Bracey, Jr., Black Studies in the Age of Obama
De Anna Reese and Malik Simba,Historiography against History: The
Propaganda of History and the Struggle for the Hearts and Minds of Black Folk
Stephen Ferguson, The Utopian Worldview of Afrocentricity: Critical
Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy
John
H. McClendon III,Materialist
Philosophical Inquiry and African American Studies

Yusuf Nuruddin, Africana
Studies: Which Way Forward – Marxism or Afrocentricity? Neither Mechanical
Marxism nor Atavistic Afrocentrism
Reiland
Rabaka, Revolutionary Fanonism: On Frantz Fanon’s Modification
of Marxism and Decolonization of Democratic Socialism

Rose M. Brewer,
Black Women’s Studies: From Theory to Transformative Practice
Rod Bush, Africana Studies and the Decolonization of the
U.S. Empire in the 21st Century
Greg Carr,What Black
Studies Is Not: Moving from Crisis to Liberation in Africana Intellectual Work
Anthony
Monteiro, The Epistemic Crisis of African American Studies: A Du
Boisian Resolution
Carter Wilson, The Dominant Class and the Construction of Racial
Oppression: A Neo-Marxist/Gramscian Approach to Race in the United States
Charles
Pinderhughes, Toward a New Theory of Internal Colonialism


Review Essays

Robeson Taj P. Frazier, Afro-Asia
and Cold War Black Radicalism

Charles L. Lumpkins,Rediscovering Hubert
Harrison: Revolutionary Socialism and Anti-White Supremacy for 21st-Century
Americans

Gerald Meyer, James
Baldwin’s Harlem: The Key to His Politics

Book
Reviews

Michelle
Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
reviewed by Lenore Daniels

Safiya Bukhari, THE WAR
BEFORE: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in
Prison, and Fighting for Those Left
Behind
reviewed by
David Gilbert

Yale University Black Collection Online

Yale University Places its Huge Cultural Collections Online: Thousands of Items Relating to African Americans Are IncludedYale University is making its vast art and cultural holdings available to the public over the Internet. Digital images of more than 259,000 items are now available online. In the future, millions of digital versions of items from the university’s museums, libraries, and archives will be accessible. The Peabody Museum of Natural History alone has more than 12 million items in its collection.

The online collections are fully searchable with a collective catalog. A search for “African American” turns up more than 2,700 items. A search for “black Americans” produced nearly 15,000 results.

Marvin X's Daughter Muhammida and Last Poet Omar Ben Hasan

Marvin X's Daughter Muhammida and Last Poet Omar Ben Hasan


Muhammida El Muhajir is the middle child of Marvin X's three daughters. Of his two sons, Abdul transitioned at 39 and Marvin K is estranged. Muhammida El Muhajir grew up in Philadelphia. Her mother, Nisa Ra, was a student of Marvin X's when he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. She danced in his myth-ritual drama Resurrection of the

Dead, performed at his Black Educational Theatre in San Francisco's Fillmore, 1972.


Nisa Ra of Philadelphia, Mother of Muhammida

Muhammida graduated from Howard University in Microbiology, but turned to the arts. Her film HIP HOP the New World Order has been screened internationally and was taught in a class at Harvard University on Hip Hop. After traveling with her daughter to Europe, her mother exclaimed, "My daughter is as well known on the streets of Paris and London as she is in Harlem and Brooklyn."

To make her film on hip hop, she traveled to Japan, Cuba, Brazil, South Africa, England, France, Germany and Denmark with her own money, alone with her camera.

For a time she was a music marketing manager at NIKE, serving as liaison to musicians and rap artists. As event planner, she organized a VIP party for the NBA All Stars at San Francisco's NIKETOWN, producing a party on all seven floors.

She wrote a film script but after her father's critique, she came full strenght, shocking her father with her bluntness and skills with the linquistics of the hood.






Muhammida and daughter,


Mahadevi.


photo Sam Anderson









Check out her web:

http://www.suninleo.com/

White Supremacy, Zionism and National Insanity

White Supremacy, Zionism and National Insanity

Preface: Amy Nogoodwoman and her Democracy Now is clearly in the camp of the Monkey Mind Media that perpetuates the world of make believe. This morning she gave a report on the Gaza Flotilla attempting to break into the Gaza concentration camp. Amy Nogoodwoman spent an inordinate amount of time voicing the views of a Zionist agent until he rushed off the air after a propaganda barrage. When she turned to an Arab journalist, he was allowed to say a few words then cut off, so we see Democracy Now is but another of the undercover Zionist entities, parading as Leftist. She didn't dare interview a leader of Harmas, the democratically elected government in Gaza. This lopsided journalism is typical of pseudo Leftist that are in boot step with the Monkey Mind Media.
--


"Marvin X at his best, clarity of perception!" --Gerald Ali, UK



Recent events in Israel such as the planned building of 1,600 housing units in Arab East Jerusalem, lead us to the conclusion the Zionists are headed down a national suicide path that will surely take America, if not the world, with them. What makes their suicide a foregone conclusion is the fact they are surrounded by nations with populations more suicidal than they.

The Saudi Arabian brand of Islam promoted by Al Quida is a return to Ya'um Jahiliyah or the days of ignorance before the advent of Islam in 632 AD. The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah are just as determined as the Jewish Zionists to execute their fanatical, dogmatic vision in the world, or in particular, the Middle East.

It is a dance of death for all peoples, with no hope in sight. The more the Muslims seem ready to conclude a deal with for some semblance of a Palestinian state, the more the Zionists expand their colonial occupation of Arab land.

Despite the winds of revolution and cries for social-political and economic justice throughout the region, the Zionists in Israel are tone deaf and determined to continue down the road to hell, for where else can they go as the Arab masses move toward a unity never before seen.

The recent visit of Israeli leader Netanyahu was a supreme example of hubris or simple minded White supremacy arrogance. He openly and unashamedly defied President Obama's call for a return to the pre-1967 borders in a final peace deal with the Palestinians. Despite having the greatest army in the world and nuclear weapons, Netanyahu claimed the 1967 borders are indefensible. How is this possible with an annual three billion dollar defense welfare check from America? And the Israeli sycophants in the US Congress treated the Zionist leader as a rock star, yet he is a star sure to fall from the sky. It is only a matter of time before the Zionist date with destiny.

Not long ago the son of a Hamas leader who confessed being a snitch for the Zionists, said he agreed to snitch after he saw nothing shall happen regarding Palestine as long as the two sides maintain their dogmatic religiosity or archaic mythology.

There can be no forward movement with such backward notions of history, of aboriginal claims of ownership based on mythology and religiosity, e.g., the Chosen people of God poppycock. At least the Arabs come from the reality that they were brazenly removed from their homeland.

How does one make peace with someone who has seized your homeland and relegated you to refugee camps within and outside your original space, especially when the occupation is based on injuries inflicted by someone else (Hitler)? Why should Arabs suffer for what Nazis did to the Jews?

The Arabs say they shall fight to the death to reclaim their land, with Hamas fighting for every inch of land taken, no matter how long it takes. It took 200 years before Saladin removed the last Crusaders! The Zionists claim Hamas will not recognize them, but what is the idea of a "Jewish" state but the non-recognition of the Palestinian people? Where is democracy in such a state, where is humanity. It is buried in mythology, a mythology that shall not survive the new era. I don't care what any holy books say, there shall be no peace without justice. This is the magic word missing in the vocabulary of both Netanyahu and President Obama. Nobody wants more than justice and nobody wants less.

What is amazing is that the Zionists have a nuclear arsenal and the greatest army in the Middle East, if not the world--at least until Hezbollah fought them to a standstill in Lebanon (a feat greater than the combined Arab armies in several wars against the Zionists)--yet all we hear is the need for security. What more security do you need? You have bombs, planes, tanks, soldiers, bio-chemical weapons of mass destruction and nukes, what more security do you need? Would tightening the grip on the Arab concentration camps suffice, i.e., will the Wall you are building satisfy your security needs, a checkpoint on every block, every mile? A snitch in every Arab home?

No matter the intractable positions on both sides, we are nearing a conclusion on this matter, yes, in spite of the duplicity of all concerned, the Zionists, their American sycophants, and the quisling Muslim governments in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf States. Also, we cannot ignore the critical role of Iran in this drama, with their support of Hamas and Hezbollah for matters of their mythological dreams.

All these myths must be cast into the dustbin of history and a new vision must be adopted by all sides, no matter how painful. But again, the vision must be based on justice, not peace. Peace with boots on the neck is not a real and lasting peace. It is a sham peace and it will only hasten the day of judgment.

What we have is a prescription for full blown Armageddon. Let the fundamental Christians rejoice along with the 12vers in Iran who anxiously await the return of the 12th Imam or Mahdi, while the Christians savor the return of their Messiah with the destruction of Jerusalem, or an even more dramatic total destruction of the Middle East.

Either the Palestinians shall obtain their state or we shall simply await the final Holocaust that will supposedly usher in the new era of peace in the world. If the 1967 borders are indefensible, equally indefensible is the idea of a "Jewish" state. This idea doesn't border on insanity, it is the essence of insanity, a total break with reality.
--Marvin X
3/15/10

Amazing Grace, for Rev. Lucius Walker (RIP)

amazin grace...for the late rev lucius walker...

by Zayid Muhammad




“Amazin grace…How sweet the sound…

That saved a soul like me…

I was once was lost…

Now I’m fighting to be free…

Only struggle

Will save you and me…”*

“Yea, though I walk through the valley

of the shadow of death;

I fear no evil; For thou art with me

Thy rod and Thy staff

They comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me

in the presence of mine enemies.

Thou anointest me with oil;

My cup runneth over…

Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me

All the days of my life; And I shall dwell

in the house of the Lord forever…”Psalm 23

the time has come

the trumpet has sounded

that miles as in davis muted trumpet has sounded

his name has been called

Luuuuucius!

Lucius Walker!

The gateway has been presented

and this man

this modest samaritan man

this man

this fearless mount of courage and faith of a man

this daniel audacious amazin grace of a man

he has ascended that stairway to heaven

received by the God he so valiantly served

to the ultimate delightful chorus

‘job well done, my son…job well done…’

and for us still here in the land of the living

and for those coming behind us

for this man

for this heroic humanitarian

we must monumentally mark his place in this time

to radiate the lessons of light of his enormous example…

so give me a truckload of bibles

in english spanish creole and french

give me a bushel of the ripest olive branches

give me crates upon crates upon crates

of medicines and medical supplies

so we can make a late 20th century

early 21st century balm in gilead…

give me a caseload of bloodied bonebroken bullets and shrapnel

as evidence of the evil of oppression

made in the usa

give me a column Zapatistas covering the rear

as surrogate angels...

“Thy road and Thy staff, they comfort me…”

give me prime photos of his wife children and grandchildren

give me a chessboard dominated by battling bishops

and a line of willing volunteers to be sacrificed

give me a hemispheric huge harvest

of yams corn apples lentils leeks

of oranges mangoes pineapples

yucca and beets

give me fish and loaves of bread

and give me flour yeast and hearth ovens

to bake our own

give me enuf righteous roasted lamb

to feed all the villages he served

that had been denied the fruits of their own sacred labor…

“…Thou preparest for me a table in the presence of mine enemies…”


for his chocolate eyed charm

for his awesome absence of ego and vanity

for his che’ like capacity to lead without commanding

for this man

for this peoples redeemer

this shining samaritan

this humble heroic humanitarian

we need huge broken tablets of unjust laws

broken by armies of the faithful that he led

we need a tall rugged cross

stained with the blood of martyrs

like camilo cienfuegos, martin luther king and bishop romero

we need all those made missing by the death squads to be found

we need david walker’s appeal

martin’s letter from a birmingham jail

che’s socialism and man

we need fidel-full analyses

of all the political minefields and crosscurrents

we still must confront

we need broadcasts of insurgent commentary by mumia abujamal

we need a huge toilet and a flushing of the waste of the blockade!

we need mumia free…

we must enshrine that little yellow school bus

with the wheelchairs of the fasters

we need video footage of baffled abusive overseers at the borders

we need doctors without borders

willing to dance with the patients they treat

we need a huge cup runneth over with faith courage love and hope

and we need lots and lots of witnesses

organized to continue…

for this man

for this daniel audacious man

this marvelous mount of courage and faith

this shining samaritan

this heroic humble humanitarian

this chocolate eyed charming amazin grace of man

we need commitment

we need commitment

we need commitment

congalleros!**

to the front!..

“The Lord is my shepard; I shall not want…”

“We refuse to back down

We will fight to the end

Revolution

Revolution

is near…”



*lyrics from Yasmin Adeigbola’s poetic retake on Amazin’ Grace

**congalleros…spanish for conga players



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‘bro.zayid’