Unity of North American Africans: 3, Unity of Black Men

Unity of North American Africans 3. Unity of the Black Men


Ancestor John Douimbia, my mentor who gave me manhood training one on one, said when I agreed to produce the Black Men's Conference in Oakland, 1980, that I was embarking on a most dangerous project that would challenge the deepest recesses of my soul. He begged me to slow down and pace myself since he had tried without success to bring together an organization of black men since the 1950s in the Bay Area. He had presented the concept of a secular organization of black men to many social activists but they ran from it like it was a hot potato. John had been an associate of Malcolm X when they hustled in Harlem. After his release from prison, Malcolm and John D, as we called him, aka The Count, since he dressed immaculately and the only brother who could out dress him was the living legend Willie Brown, an associate of John D's who became a state legislator, speaker of the state house and Mayor of San Francisco--Malcolm and John met together in Los Angeles when Malcolm arrived to organize the mosque for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. John was doing some organizing on his own when Malcolm arrived, so he invited Malcolm to his meeting, a multi-cultural socialist gathering. When Malcolm saw what John was doing, he begged the Count to help put the mosque together in San Francisco. John was a merchant seaman but he told Malcolm he would see what he could do when he returned from overseas.

John kept his word and attempted to take the San Francisco mosque to a higher level, but the minister and members were not ready to accept the concept of an organization of black men outside the mosque but associated with the mosque. This idea freaked them out and they labeled John a hypocrite. As we know, Malcolm came to the same idea once he departed the Nation of Islam, that black men needed a secular organization where we could all come together regardless of our religious views, that's why he established the Organization of African American Unity, modeled after the OAU or Organization of African Unity.

John D and I planned and organized the Oakland Black Men's Conference in 1980 at the Oakland Auditorium, bringing together a thousand black men. Participants included Dr. Nathan Hare,
Dr. Wade Nobles, Dr. Oba T'Shake, Dr. Lige Daley, Dr. Yusef Bey, Paul Cobb, Dezzie Woods Jones, Betty King, Michael Lange, et al. As a symbol of unite, we had tried to bring Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton together, but it didn't happen. The final word we got from Huey was through his brother Melvin who told us Huey said there was too much blood on the path between him and Cleaver. Although he, himself, wanted to reconcile with Cleaver, in respect to the comrades who had lost loved ones in the war between the Huey and Cleaver factions, he could not meet nor reconcile with Eldridge.

In my last meeting with Huey in a West Oakland Crack house, I challenged Huey. "Why can't black men come together, after all, Arabs kill each other but they then embrace in the Mosque."
Huey's reply was, "We ain't A-rabs!"

And so this grand opportunity of black man unity was lost. My meeting was the last time I'd see my friend. He was murdered by a youth a few weeks after our meeting in the Crack house. Even his murder was supreme irony for had he not unified black youth into an army of liberation the likes of which America had never experienced, making the Black Panther Party a threat to the national security of the United States?

And yet, in spite of their negrocities (Amiri Baraka term), the Black Panther Party had unified black men and women into an organization of fearless youth and adults that achieved international recognition as the representatives of the North American African nation. The Nation of Islam had done the same, under Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. Malcolm would later say the NOI was the best organization nigguhs ever had, and Eldridge said the same thing about the Black Panther Party. Of course many people blame him for the internal problems, aside from what the FBI and its Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program did to destroy all black organizations and to prevent the rise of a black messiah who could unify all factions.
--Marvin X ( El Muhajir)
12/8/10

See Marvin X's Eldridge Cleaver, My Friend the Devil, a memoir, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2009.