Save KPOO RADIO NOW!

It has come to my attention that KPOO radio is in financial trouble. We must save KPOO radio at any cost. It is the independent voice of the people, the only voice we have.

I call upon religious or church leaders to help save KPOO. I call upon all Black Studies professors to make a contribution to keeping KPOO as an independent voice of the Black Community. All workers, especially Union workers must support KPOO. City of San Francisco workers must support KPOO.
Students must support. The founder of KPOO, Joe Rudolph, was a student at San Francisco State University. His was in the BSU and therefore the BSU must muster support for KPOO.

Joe was a dear friend and so I call upon you in his name for your support of KPOO. Your donation is tax deductible under IRS 501 (c) 3.


One of the last things Joe Rudolph said to me was, "Marvin, there ain't gonna be no more Negroes like us?" I replied, as I whispered to Joe while he leaned against a tree in Mosswood Park, "No, Joe we are the last of a generation." We are classic Negroes, of which there shall be no more!

The Blood of Syria

For Mohja Kahf and the Syrian people


Is this truly a world of human beings
so often we have defied this myth
ritual behavior reveals the truth
we can be cruel beyond imagination
regimes will kill to keep power
mass murder
torture beyond the human imagination
yet the news continues
and we know the story
are we immune
imagine in an instant
we could be Syrians
scrapping for life
some national security scare
arrest all Muslim
all Sikhs
all Blacks
all Mexicans
all Asians
all Gays, lesbians.

Where are we in this world?
Sun Ra said Take Me To Your Leader!

Surely you have a voice
rise up and sing
rise up and sing
not Silent Night
but the holy songs of resurrection, of joy and happiness
sing
sing to the king of the land
don't be a parrot
a deranged black bourgeoisie
you can be progressive
express consciousness
come out the box
are you part of the problem
or part of the solution?

Rise up, Syria! A new day has dawned in the Middle East.
Imagine it is all leading to the Palestinian homeland

--Marvin X/El Muhajir
8/24/12

Dr. Akinyele Umoja interviews Marvin X

Georgia  State University  Professor and Chair of Black Studies, Akinyele Umoja, was in the Bay Area to interview Black Arts Movement co-founder Marvin X. Over dinner at a Cambodian restaurant, Akinyele asked the author of The Wisdom of Plato Negro, several questions on the birth of Black Arts West Theatre in San Francisco, 1966. Akinyele's main reference was Marvin X's 1998 autobiography Somethin' Proper,
Black Bird Press.

Question: What was the role of Ethna Wyatt (Hurriyah Asar)  in Black Arts West?
Marvin X: She was an organizer and keeper of peace between us brothers: Ed Bullins, Duncan Barber,
Hillary Broadous and Carl Bossiere. She kept us from killing each other with the power of her love. She was not an artist but a comrade in revolution.

Question: What made you join the Nation of Islam?

Marvin X: I joined the Nation of Islam because I was a black nationalist, I wanted a black nation and I appreciated the spirituality of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

Question: When did you join the NOI?

Marvin X: 1967, Easter Sunday. The Black House project with Eldridge Cleaver, Ed Bullins, Ethna Wyatt and myself was falling apart from ideological differences between us artists and Eldridge who was pushing Communism. This difference would lead to a rift between so called cultural nationalists and the Black Panther Party, who dismissed anyone who didn't pick up the gun as a reactionary or cultural nationalist, especially artists and intellectuals.

Question: How did you get to the mosque?

Marvin X: The mosque came to us in the form of a brother Alonzo Harris Batin, who became guru of Black Arts West. Alonzo taught us savage artists Islamic civilization, even though he was a career criminal who had spent time with Eldridge Cleaver in San Quentin. Black Panther Earl Anthony, aka Earl the Squirrel, a self-confessed snitch wrote a play about Eldridge and Batin, produced off Broadway by Woody King.

But Batin taught us how to eat to live, with bean soup, carrot pies, Whiting fish, wheat bread, with a butter and honey spread. He taught us that we were so-called Negroes and other Supreme Wisdom of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. He taught us not to bow down to corrupt officials in the NOI. Batin was highly upset when I told him I had confessed to NOI officials in Chicago that Ethna and I had been fornicating. He roasted me for confessing to the likes of National Captain Raymond Shariff, National Secretary John Ali (FBI agent).

Another major influence was Ali Sharif Bey, an Ahmedia Muslim who spoke several languages and was well versed in Islamic history. Sharif was our Arabic teacher (he gave me my first Arabic name, Nazzam which means organizer,  and he was our Islamic studies teacher. He was against sectarianism and religiosity, citing the unity of religions, especially in adhering to primitive myth and ritual.

As per how early Islam was in my writings, my first play Flowers for the Trashman has lines addressed to the white man that any one can recognize as coming from the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The play was written around 1965.

Question: What was your relationship with Mamadou Lumumba?

Marvin X: He was like my teacher, highly intellectual and analytical, spoke French and Spanish. I met Kenny Freeman or Mamadou Lumumba at Merritt College, 1962. I met him the same time I met Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Donald Warden, Richard Thorne, Ernie Allen, Isaac Moore, Ann Williams and Carol Freeman, Mamadou's wife. I used to go over their house to get knowledge, share my writings. My early writings would appear in SoulBook, edited by Mamadou. But I would go to their pad and if I happened to be there at  six o'clock, the KPFA evening news would come on. I have been listening to KPFA since 1962.

Question: You have said the Black Arts Movement gave birth to the politicos?

Marvin X: Larry Neal said the Black Arts Movement was the sister of the Black Power Movement.
I say the Black Arts Movement was the mother, a kind of half-way house for persons to get their black consciousness then move forward into the political realm. Co-founder Bobby Seale acted in my second play Come Next Summer, circa 1965, even before the founding of Black Arts West, 1966. Eldrdige Cleaver had founded the Black History Club at Soledad Prison, visited by the staff of Black Dialogue Magazine, 1966. We would publish the writings of Eldridge and the poetry of Alprintis Bunchy Carter and other inmates. Before it appeared in Soul on Ice, Black Dialogue published Eldridge's essay My Queen, I Greet You.

Upon his release from Soledad, December 1966, I was the first person Eldridge hooked up with, and he used his advance from Soul on Ice, essays, to fund Black House, a cultural/political center. No matter what, Eldridge was influenced by the cultural happenings at Black House, even though his main objective was pushing Marxism, something we artists rejected. And once I introduced him to Black Panther Bobby Seale, the world knows the rest. (See my memoir Eldridge Cleaver: My friend the devil, Black Bird Press, 2009)

Once the Black Panther Party ridiculed the intellectuals and artists for reactionary behavior in not picking up the gun, the Bay Area political atmosphere became toxic: brothers and sisters who had once been together were not ideological enemies. Violence was used to suppress political dissent or any behavior not in harmony with the Black Panther Party. Many artists fled to the east coast, musicians, writers, painters. They felt threatened by the dogmatic BPP.

On one level, it would have been nice if we could have had at least working unity, functional unity. The irony is the the Black Arts Movement nurtured black consciousness into the politicos, then they turned on Mother!

It wasn't until the Pan African Festival in Algiers that the Black Panther Party got a clear understanding of the essential  role of Culture and Art in revolution.

On Day in the Life of Plato Negro

11:00AM Visit Dr. Julia and Nathan Hare. Julia Hare performs piano concert for her adopted nephew Marvin X and his student, author Ptah Allah El (Tracy Mitchell) who wrote the introduction to Marvin's latest book The Wisdom of Plato Negro, parables/fables. The Hares are doing fine.

1:00PM  Marvin X and Ptah Interviewed by Terry Collins at KPOO radio, San Francisco. Reads parables and discussed the recent claim that Richard Aoki was an agent. Marvin quotes Dr. Nathan Hare who teaches the fictive theory, i.e., everything the white man says is fiction until proven to be a fact.


8:00PM Daughter Muhammida and her mother, Nisa Ra, MX's former wife, visit from New York and Philly. Muhammida is in town to work on an appearance by Keyshia Cole at Defermery Park on Saturday. Nisa Ra will screen her short film Black Love Lives at the Uptown Apartment's screening room on Sunday, 7:30-9:30. 500 William Street, downtown Oakland. 510-295.3535.

Black Love Lives, Oakland Screening

5

The Wisdom of Plato Negro, parables/fables

Ishmael Reed Reviews The Sayings of Plato Negro, Marvin X

Review by Ishmael Reed, 
Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley

Photo: Michael Simon

If someone would write a book demythologizing the Black Power movement, how would they assess it? One of great nobility, or one of hypocrisy, one of courage or one of cowardice, one that fostered change in the status quo, or one
that was part of the problem. Or would one conclude that it was one having mixed results.
       
That it  modified the direction of The Civil Rights Movement, which was heading toward Anglo Saxon assimilation, the way that many Irish, Italian and other white ethnic groups lost their roots and thereby lost their souls, is indisputable. 

Marvin X, who is not only a terrific writer but a Black Power historian has served us well by listing all of the 60s poets who were influenced by Islam and other non-Western sources, (though, without Muslim scholars there’d be no Western civilization.) 

African writers, whom I interviewed for my book about Muhammad Ali find African American Muslim conversion puzzling since they view Islam as an invader’s religion and one that treats the indigenous population, harshly, but one cannot underestimate the influence of Islam upon the world.

However,if I had to pin down the influences upon Marvin X’s The Wisdom of Plato Negro,Parables/Fables,I would cite the style of Yoruba texts. I studied for some years under the tutoring of the poet and scholar Adebisi T.Aromolaran ( “ Wise Sayings For Boys and Girls”)and was guided through some texts in the Yoruba language which revealed that didacticism  is a key component of the Yoruba story telling style. Africans use proverbs to teach their children the lessons of life. Marvin X acknowledges the Yoruba influence on his book, The Wisdom of Plato Negro, Parables/Fables.

  He imparts wisdom by employing cautionary tales and uses his own life and mistakes to consul the young to avoid mistakes. George Bernard Shaw said that if you don’t write your own plays, others will write them for you and they will “degrade”and “vulgarize” you. As part of a grant, I attended local theater for three years and found the portraits of blacks to be offensive,mostly. The women were prostitutes and the men were like the black man in “Precious,” a bestial evil. 

Marvin X in “One Day In the Life”, his classic play about recovery, which I saw at the Black Rep., the only local theater that doesn’t depend upon a audience that desires guilt free productions, was one of the few plays that wasn’t escapist, or preached post racism or blamed the victim.

Moreover, unlike some of the books written by popular African American writers, his book does not look backward to the period of slavery, though some of that is here. He writes about the contemporary problems of a community under attack. He blames crack for causing “ a great chasm between adults and children, children who were abandoned,abused, and neglected, emotionally starved and traumatized.”
       
Pundits,scholars and reporters who have posed as experts on the inner city, but
don’t live here, have blamed the middle class for abandoning the urban centers.They’re wrong. The middle class is making all of the cash from profits from vice. They run the motels, where the prostitution trade takes place. 

When Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker slapped an injunction against two prostitution hotels which were scenes of child sex trafficking, beatings and rapes by pimps, the proprietors complained that she cost them $80,000.

The middle class are the absentee landlords, who plopped down a crack house in my neighborhood, they’re storeowners who make hundreds of thousands of dollars selling liquor. None of these proprietors is black! When I asked the Muslim who runs the Northside Supermarket, who was paid a fawning tribute by a clueless Chronicle reporter, who painted him as some kind of Santa Claus, when those attending our neighborhood crime meetings have complained about the criminal activity in from of his store for years,I was called out of order by an Oakland policeman, who turned out to be a friend of his, when I asked what a Muslim was doing selling liquor?

I wrote, “I am sure that I’m not the only North Oakland resident who is outraged by Chronicle writer, Justin Berton, portraying Yahya ‘Mike" Korin of Northside Supermarket as some kind of neighborhood Robin Hood who hands out turkeys to the poor at Xmas.

“I've attended meetings over the years, where our neighbors, black, white, and Hispanic, have complained about this store which attracts some of the most unsavory elements in our neighborhood and whose violent behavior has threatened the safety of our residents.” I had to mention whites because “Mike” was claiming
that only newcomers were protesting against his store, and that he was some
kind of benevolent uncle to the folks.

Marvin X exposes the situation of other ethnic groups invading black neighborhoods and making the lion’s share of profits from vice, while the media focus upon the mules of the operation, the pathetic and disgusting pimps, the drug dealers who are killing each other over profits that are piddling next to the great haul made by the suppliers of the guns and the drugs. Don’t expect the local newspapers to cover this end of the distribution.
       
Marvin X writes: “ The so-called Negro is the donkey of the world, everybody
rides him to success. If you need a free ride to success,jump on the Negro’s back and ride into the sunset. He will welcome you with open arms. No saddle needed, just jump on his back and ride him to the bank.”  

When you learn that the government ignored the dumping of drugs into our neighborhoods by their anti-communist allies, you can understand the meaning of Marvin X’s words. Not only are invading ethnic groups and white gun suppliers benefitting from using the black neighborhoods as a resource ,but the government as well.*

Marvin X also takes aim at the Dream Team academics who “parrot” the line
coming down from the One Percent that the problems of blacks are self-inflicted.
“The state academics and intellectuals joined loudly in parroting the king’s every wish. Thank God the masses do not hear them pontificate or read their books. After all, these intellectual and academic parrots are well paid, tenured and eat much parrot seed. Their magic song impresses the bourgeoisie who have a vested interested in keeping the song of the parrot alive.”
        
Marvin X’s answer to this intellectual Vichy regime has been to cultivate 
off campus intellectuals by conducting an open air classroom on 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland, which is how the peripatetic philosophers like
Plato used to impart their knowledge in open air academies.

The Black Arts movement expanded the audience for poetry. It inspired thousands of young people to write. They are the grandmothers and grandfathers of the Hip Hoppers. They produced children who are high achievers. The only thing that could mar the Black Arts legacy is its tolerance for a lunatic fringe. One, who used to edit a black magazine, but hasn’t written a lick since the 1960s, came out here recently and was greeted warmly, when if you put some white skin on him and covered him with tattoos, he’d be indistinguishable from your ordinary low level skin head,without the Budweiser six pack.

I would give the Black Arts a mixed review. I’m the one who said that in
the global village, nationalism is the village idiot. But I have supported it in concrete ways because the Black Nationalist movement is the only roadblock to black culture becoming extinct!
     
Moreover,some of those who were Yacubists of the 60s changed. Muhammad Ali,who met with the KKK during the 1970s, recently attended his grand son’s Bar Mitzvah.
____________
* Parry, Robert “How John Kerry exposed the Contra-cocaine scandal,
Derided by the mainstream press and taking on Reagan at the height of his popularity, the freshman senator battled to reveal one of America's ugliest foreign policy secrets” Salon.com, Oct.25,2004


Ishmael Reed,author of “Going Too Far, Essays About America’s Nervous Breakdown”
Email: ireedpub@yahoo.com
Tel: 5104280116
Address : 870 53rd St. Oakland, Ca.94608





Black Bird Press
1222 Dwight Way
Berkeley CA 94702
195 pages
$19.95

Marvin X reads and signs his book on Saturday, September 1, 3-6pm at
the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th Street @ Franklin, downtown Oakland.
Donation $20.00, includes signed book. 

Marvin X will be accompanied by Academy of da Corner poets Aries Jordan, Ptah Allah El and
Ramal Lamar. Percussionist Tacuma King will accompany Marvin X, also, trumpet master Earl Davis.
Refreshments served. Call 510-200-4164.