My Friend the Devil
A Memoir
March 21, 2009
Introduction
by
Amiri Baraka (RIP)
Marvin X‘s newest book, “Eldridge Cleaver: My Friend, The
Devil” is an important Expose!, notonly of whom his good friend
really was… (I confess I thought something like that, in less
metaphysical terms, from the day we met, at San Francisco State,
1967) But also of whom Marvin was/is. Now, Marvin has confessed
to being Yacub, whom Elijah Muhammad taught us was the “evil big
head scientist” who created the devil. (Marvin’s head is very
large for his age.)
What is good about this book is Marvin’s telling us something
about who Eldridge became as the Black Panther years receded in
the rear view mirror. I remember during this period, when I
learned that Marvin was hanging around Cleaver even after he’d
made his televised switch from anti-capitalist revolutionary to
Christian minister, denouncing the 3rd World revolutionaries and
the little Marxism he thought he knew, while openly
acknowledging beating his wife as a God given male prerogative,
I said to Marvin, “I thought you was a Muslim” . His retort,
“Jesus pay more money than Allah, Bro”, should be a classic
statement of vituperative recidivism.
But this is one of the charms of this memoir. It makes the
bizarre fathomable. Especially the tales of fraternization with
arguably the most racist & whitest of the Xtian born agains with
Marvin as agent, road manager, co-conspirator-confessor, for the
post-Panther – very shot- out Cleaver. It also partially
explains some of Cleaver’s moves to get back in this country, he
had onetime denounced, and what he did after the big cop out.
Plus, some of the time, these goings on seem straight out
hilarious. Though frequently, that mirth is laced with a sting
of regret. Likewise, I want everyone to know that I am writing
this against my will, as a favor to Yacub.—Amiri
Baraka. Newark, 5/13/09
Chapter 1
It all began at
Soledad Prison, sometime during 1966. Black Dialogue
magazine was approached by attorney Beverly Axelrod
about making a visit to the Soledad Prison Black Culture
Club. The editors agreed to make the visit, including
myself as fiction editor. The other editors included Art
Sheridan, Gerald, Aubrey and Peter LaBrie, Sadaat Ahmed,
Joe Goncalves, Duke Williams, et al. We made our way
down the coast to Soledad. I was both excited and sad
because my brother Ollie was probably an inmate at the
time, though I can't remember.
The only known photo of Eldridge Cleaver and Marvin X outside the house where Cleaver and Lil'
Bobby Hutton fought a gun battle with the Oakland Police who murdered Lil' Bobby when he emerged
from the house to surrender but refused to remove all his clothes as Cleaver did.
photo Muhammad Al Kareem
Our staff was taken
to the hosting officer's apartment and briefed on what
to do and not to do. No contact with inmates, no passing
or taking of literature. We agreed but it didn't mean a
thing. Soon as we got inside the meeting room we knew
what we were going to do. At first we got inside and saw
the brothers seated, with the meeting in progress.
Eldridge was chair and his lieutenant was Alprentice
“Bunchy” Carter. Bunchy was a very handsome black man,
so handsome it belied his leadership qualities as head
of the Los Angeles Slauson gang.
But chairman
Cleaver was a giant of a man, tell, light skinned and
articulate. But more than the words said, I was
immediately impressed with the organizational structure
with brothers on post with military style discipline. It
was probably the first time I'd seen black men so
organized. We know now according to brother Kumasi that
this was the beginning of the prison movement in
California and the nation, this black culture club of
mostly young black men confined to the dungeon as so
many are today, causing havoc in black family and
community life.
In this Soledad
dungeon would come a prison movement on par with the
black student movement, black arts, and black studies.
As I listened to Chairman Eldridge speak, I said to
myself this is a dangerous Negro if allowed to depart
these walls. Clearly, he was well read after a total of
eighteen years of confinement in the California Gulags.
I would learn later he was soaked in Marxist Leninism
and literature in general. And when Black Dialogue
obtained his writings for publication, especially “My,
Queen, I Greet You,” we suspected this was a man with
the passion and writing skills of Baldwin. And of course
he must have sensed this comparison and thus his need to
denounce Baldwin to take a shot at the black literary
crown, although he did it by a homophobic denunciation
which led one to suspect his own sexual improprieties,
especially after so long in prison.
But at that first
meeting, we were humbled to be with the brothers, to
share with them by reading our writings from Black
Dialogue. At the end of the meeting we all embraced
and exchanged materials in violation of the officer's
request. We gave them copies of Dialogue and they
gave us manuscripts of their writings which were later
published in Dialogue and Journal of Black
Poetry. As I said, we published “My Queen, I Greet
You,” in Dialogue and Joe Goncalves published the
poetry of Bunchy and others in JBP. We left
Soledad and headed back up the coast to San Francisco.
Thus was established a connection between the prison
movement and black students, the black arts movement and
eventually the Black Panther Party when I introduced
Elbridge to Bobby Seale soon after his release from
prison.
Chapter II
Several months
passed before I met Eldridge again. Somebody called me
to come over Sister Mary Anna's house. Maryanna Waddy
was the daughter of painter Ruth Waddy, but more
importantly, she was the student, though somewhat older
at the time, who aggressively pushed for the name change
from Negro Students Association to the Black Students
Union. Maryanna was a strong black woman who took no
jive, maybe the result of black consciousness taught by
her mother. But when I entered her house, Eldridge was
there trying to introduce his plans to the community.
There seemed to be
some tension between him and Maryanna, a black man/black
woman power battle. Maybe Maryanna knew about Eldridge's
white woman lawyer, Beverley Axelrod, who had smuggled
his manuscript Soul on Ice out of Soledad. We
would learn that Eldridge had promised to marry her, so
his blackness was suspect from the beginning—but we
would handle that matter a few months down the road.
Maryanna and most of those present, maybe members of the
BSU, including those of us from Black Dialogue.
If I recall correctly, Eldridge gave me a ride home and
we agreed to meet again soon.
Things were going bad for us at Black Arts West Theatre
on Fillmore Street, across the street from Tree's pool
hall and around the corner from the Sun Reporter
newspaper, published by the millionaire Communist Dr.
Carlton Goodlett. BAW was breaking up because of egos
and other psychopathic behavior in our crew which
included
Ed Bullins, Duncan Barber, Hillary Broadous,
Carl Bossiere, and Ethna Wyatt. All of us wanted to make
BAW happen but our egos got in the way, along with
deeper mental problems. In spite of these problems, we
did my plays and the plays of
Ed Bullins. We had jazz
concerts with the Bay Area's best, including Raphael
Garrett, Monte Waters, Dewey Redman, Oliver Jackson, B.J.,
and others.
Only thing with the
musicians, many had white women which we would not allow
in the theatre, since we were black nationalists on the
road to becoming members of the Nation of Islam. A long
time criminal Muslim came to our theatre to recruit us,
Alonzo Harris Batin, who became the guru and mentor of
BAW. Batin was a criminal with a heart of gold. He
wanted us to join the Nation even though most of the
time he was not in good standing and considered a
hypocrite. Soon we were indoctrinated by Batin and
eventually most of us joined the Nation except
Ed Bullins. Bullins was into his art and living or at least
staying in the Beatnik area of North Beach.
For awhile, Ethna was the glue that held BAW together.
She fed us when we were low on money to buy food. She
would cook something that would be enough for the crew
and she would try to stop us from killing each other as
we ego-tripped. Ethna had come from Chicago, maybe
during or around the time of that Summer of Love. It
seemed many beautiful women fled Chicago to the West
coast. Ethna's friend had come, Sandra Williams, helping
out at BAW. Danny Glover acted in BAW, performing in
Dorothy Ahmed's play Papa's Daughter, about
incest. Actress and SFSU student Vonetta McGee performed
in Bullins' play It Has No Choice and another
play by Bullins that I can't remember the name.
And then one day the crew called me to the lobby of the
theatre to meet a man they said spoke seven languages.
After they called me several times to come to the lobby,
I came from the theatre to meet a tall, jet black
brother with straight hair, Ali Sharif Bey, who indeed
did speak several languages, including English, Persian,
Spanish, French, Arabic and Urdu. He became our on-site
Islamic scholar and teacher, teaching us Arabic and his
vast knowledge of Islam based on the Ahmediah sect, the
great evangelists of Islam to the West. Ali Sharif Bey
would surface later as the runner for the SLA when they
kidnapped Patty Hearst. He is the source for my master
thesis docudrama How I Met Isa.
But in spite of all this community support—none from the
Black bourgeoisie until later at the Black House which
Eldridge convinced me to help organize since I told him
I was tired of the bs at BAW and was ready to do
something different. We discussed setting up what
eventually became Black House, a political/cultural
center on Broderick Street off Divisadero in the
Fillmore. Ed Bullins soon joined Eldridge, Ethna and
myself. For a few months Black House became the cultural
center of the Bay with thousands of conscious hungry
black flocking there for culture. Black House
participants included Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia
Toure, Chicago Art Ensemble, Sarah Webster Fabio,
Reginald Lockett, Emory Douglas, Samuel Napier and
Little Bobby Hutton. On the political side, Eldridge
brought in a Communist party leader, Rosco Proctor.
Eldridge had no time for the culture, even though he
couldn't help but be influenced by it since it was at
the house he financed with his advance from Soul On
Ice. He and Baraka had little to say to each other
even though Baraka's Communication Project at San
Francisco State College/now University, had its off
campus base at Black House. Years later these two men
would switch ideologies with Baraka turning Communist
and Eldridge finding religion. Eldridge would eventually
go from Communist to Christian, to Mormon to Moonie to
Religious Science.
But at Black House he was strictly Communist and he
pushed hard to get us to follow his path, though we
resisted until Black House fell apart from ideological
differences. Before it fell we had gone to Beverly
Axelrod's house to literally remove Cleaver since we
found it a contradiction for the chairman of Black House
to be sleeping at the White House. One afternoon brother
Batin and I made Eldridge move his things from the White
House while Miss Ann cried. Among his belongings was
that wicker chair, spear and rug made famous in that
photo of Huey Newton.
Chapter III
Eldridge and Alonzo Batin were old prison comrades, having shared time
throughout the California prison system. They were
classic men, so classic they were made the subject of an
off-Broadway play by Earl Anthony, produced by Woody
King. Batin kept pressure on Eldridge to be black,
something EC didn't want to do because he was suffering
from the addiction to white supremacy. With all the
cultural happenings at Black House, Eldridge preferred
to listen over and over to what we called a white hippy
folk singer named Bob Dylan.
Black House people
didn't give a damn about Bob Dylan, hardly knew who he
was, but Eldridge played his music continuously, trying
to make us listen to it at every turn. But our favorite
singer soon joined us to live at Black House, Willie
Dale. Willie was another prison comrade of Eldridge's
who sang the Black National Anthem of the 60s, Louis
Farrakhan's The White Man's Heaven is a Black Man's
Hell. Willie, with his booming voice, could sing it
better than Farrakhan. After moving Eldridge fully into
Black House, we wanted to secure him a black woman, so
Willie's wife, Vernasteen, went down to their home town,
Bakersfield, and brought back Marilyn, who came to stay
with Eldridge until he met the love of his life,
Kathleen.
The Black House
became a half way house for black revolutionaries who
were first indoctrinated with black consciousness then
joined political organizations. Despite his resistance
to blackness, Eldridge was touched by simply being in
the house with so much culture going on. And then came
Emory Douglass from San Francisco City College reading a
poem Revolutionary Things. Emory became Black Panther
Minister of Culture. Then came Samuel Napier, a worker
who wanted to get involved. Sam went on to become
Minister of Distribution of the Black Panther newspaper.
George Murray was part of Baraka's Communication
project, and became the Black Panther Minister of
Education. Thus it is my theory, contrary to Larry
Neal's assertion that BAM was the sister of BLM, BAM was
the Mother who nurtured her children and prepared them
with the necessary consciousness for revolutionary
struggle, hence the prime importance of the cultural
revolution.
For a long time I
couldn't figure out what Huey Newton meant when he said
I taught him things, for it was Huey who had taught me
consciousness at Merritt College, but after thinking
about it for years, I concluded maybe I did teach Huey
simple street theatre which the Panthers executed to the
max, with their costumes and political rhetoric. Of
course Bobby Seale was in my second play Come Next
Summer, 1966, months before he and Huey founded the
BPP.
He played a young man trying to find himself, ultimately
joining the revolution. The San Francisco State BSU's
Communication Project, directed by Baraka, recruited
several BSU brothers and sisters to do the plays of
Baraka, Ben Caldwell,
Bullins, and Jimmy Garrett. These
actors became real live revolutionaries when they
initiated the Third World Strike at SFSU, one of the
most violent and the longest in American academic
history, again illustrating the necessity of cultural
consciousness in liberation. The strike led to the
founding of Black and Ethnic Studies at SFSU.
Chapter IV
Eldridge had no
knowledge of the Black Panthers until I informed him out
of our artistic desire to get rid of him as chair of
Black House, even though he had made it happen by
putting up the money, but we rejected his desire to push
Marxism at any cost, even though he paid the cost to be
the boss. I didn't think he was so dogmatic about his
mission which was to create a Communist organization.
Thus when we realized he was merely using artists to
advance his political goals, we objected. For a short
time we went along with his sessions on Communism,
sometimes they included Rosco Proctor. I think Rosco was
secretary of the Communist party of California. We
didn't mind reading Mao's Talks at Yenan Forum on Art
and Literature or Robert F. Williams' Negroes
With Guns.
But when we tired
of the Marxist approach of Cleaver, I suggested he meet
some of my friends across the Bay who were arming
themselves for self defense against the police. I
thought this would be a way to get rid of Cleaver so we
could do our cultural work. Cleaver best describes
meeting the Panthers for the first time in his book
Post-Prison Writings . But I took him to meet Bobby Seale
one night after a radio interview at a station in Jack
London Square. I took him by Bobby Seale's house in
North Oakland, got Bobby to come outside to Cleaver's
car. Bobby got in and the world knows the rest. Hooking
up with the Panthers was not the idea Cleaver came out
of prison to pursue, but it was still a dream come true,
although I knew there would be hell to pay for somebody,
in particular Bobby and Huey who I knew were no match
for Cleaver's chicanery.
Even though Bobby
and Huey were well read, they were no match for
Cleaver,
especially in terms of Marxism. Nor were they on par
with Cleaver's organizational skills and especially his
ability to move on those in opposition to his mission,
even to the point of murder. Who knows how many
bodies Cleaver left behind in the Gulag, or his special
skills in getting rid of enemies.
Huey may have been a
psychopath but still he was no match for Cleaver. I was
glad Cleaver was hooking up with the Panthers because it
took pressure off us artists. But I felt sorry for what
awaited the Panthers because I knew Cleaver was a man
who had to be in control, especially because he had
superior knowledge and had proven organizational skills
as evidenced by the Soledad Prison Black Culture Club,
which was a military organization as well.
Around the time I
was introducing Cleaver to the Panthers, they were
moving on a rival Panther organization the BPP called
the Paper Panthers, led by their former associates in
Donald Warden's AfroAmerican Association and co-students
at Merritt: Ken and Carol Freeman, Ernie Allen, and
others who were part of the group of neo black
intellectuals at Merritt, including myself, Richard
Thorne, Isaac Moore, Ann Williams, Maurice Dawson, John
Thomas, Wayne Combash and others. Several of us were
associated with Soulbook, the Revolutionary
Action Movement (RAM) publication headed by Robert F.
Williams and Max Stanford (now Muhammad Ahmed).
But Huey and Bobby
had separated from the so-called Paper Panthers because
they did not recognize the supremacy of armed
self-defense. They eventually gave the Paper Panthers an
ultimatum: put up guns or shut up and stop calling
themselves Black Panthers. Again, Cleaver gives a good
description of this conflict in Post-Prison Writings.
I am certain Ernie Allen and Ken Freeman's brother,
Donald Freeman (Baba Lumumba) can give their side of the
story with documentation. Baba Lumbuma has a letter from
the BPP to the Black Panther Party of Northern
California that invites them to stop using the Panther
name, signed by Huey and Bobby.
Eventually there
was a confrontation between the two Panther groups in
San Francisco at the headquarters of Bill Bradley (now
Oba T'Shaka). (I am writing from total recall so events
may be out of chronological order but I think the events
happened close to the order I'm describing. There are a
plethora of books on the BPP to confirm the sequence of
events or correct my amnesia. If the reader has more
accurate information, please submit it to me for
inclusion in my narrative so I won't be guilty of
revisionism.)
After introducing
Eldridge to the Panthers, events at Black House happened
in rapid succession, leading toward the end of the
cultural component and the establishment of Black House
as the San Francisco headquarters of the BPP. Again, I
may have the chronological order confused, after all, I
am recalling events of forty years ago from memory.
Anyway, Cleaver becomes minister of information of the
BPP and soon followed the first publication of the BPP
newspaper, headlined with the police murder of Denzil
Dowell in Richmond. Eldridge and Emory Douglas laid out
the paper.
Besides Muhammad
Speaks, the BPP newspaper would become the most
powerful newspaper of the 60s revolution. And of course
much of the distribution success can be attributed to
Samuel Napier, Minister of Distribution. What I remember
most about Samuel was his innocence and sincerity about
wanting to get involved and giving his all once
involved. I was never more depressed than when I learned
he was murdered in the internecine violence when the BPP
factions split between Huey's west coast army and
Eldridge's east coast army. Sam was murdered then set
afire in New York.
When I performed my
play One Day In the Life in 1997 at Sista's Place
in New York, the brothers pulled me aside and said the
following: "Marvin, we love you, but we don't give a
damn about Huey Newton," (the play has a scene of my
last meeting with Huey—the setting of the one-act play
Salaam, Huey, Salaam, by Ed Bullins and Marvin X,
New Federal Theatre, 2008). New York is Eldridge's turf,
they told me. "His army is still here." When he died May
1, 1998, I organized his memorial service in Oakland,
along with Sister Majedah Rahman, a former Panther.
Many Panthers did
not attend because of their loyalty to Huey. Those who
did attend included: Emory Douglas, Tarika Lewis,
Richard Aoki (recently deceased, the first Asian
Panther), Dr. Nathan Hare, Dr. Yusef Bey, Imam Alamin,
Minister Keith Muhammad, Kathleen and Joju Cleaver.
Kathleen said to me after the service, "Marvin, the
service was great, but there were just too many
Muslims." Well, if it weren't for us Muslims, there
would have not been any recognition of Cleaver's
contribution to the revolution. Kathleen had agreed to
have a poem I wrote read at his funeral in Los Angeles.
But let's get back
to the chronology. There was a group of youth who made
the basement of Black House their playhouse and
apparently there was a lot of things going on down there
between the youth, like playing hooky from school and
sexual abuse of girls. We got word from some of our
bourgeoisie friends, in particular Dezzie Woods and
Bennie Ivy that the police were going to raid Black
House. The Black bourgeoisie did give financial support
to Black House, in contrast to their lack of support for
Black Arts West. Maybe the notoriety of Black House made
them more giving, especially with the presence of EC in
the house, about to become a best selling author.
Everybody likes to be around a star.
No one had time for
the youth except me, certainly not
Eldridge or
Ed
Bullins, so I was the liaison with the youth, some of
whom I have been in contact with until today. Lil Bobby
Hutton came to me one day with a directive from the
Supreme Commander of the BPP, Huey P. Huey, saying the
youth clubhouse had to be closed down. Lil Bobby was 16
and Huey was his hero. Lil Bobby was the third person to
join the BPP and became Secretary, a model for youth of
today to join the liberation struggle and forsake gang
banging, set tripping and other reactionary activities.
In my supreme
arrogance, I told Lil Bobby, "Fuck the Supreme
Commander!" I saw death in his eyes for me. But I felt
Huey was an equal and even though the BPP had taken over
Black House, they did not control me. Lil Bobby looked
at me as if I had cursed God Almighty. "We go deal with
you, Padna!" My days in the Black House were growing
short. That night all I heard were Black Panthers
clicking 45 automatics outside my bedroom door. Of
course I was just as mad and psychopathic as any
Panther. I was fearless. My attitude was, "Fuck you
motherfuckers. Kiss my ass."
Nothing happened
except the coming exit of myself and other artists from
Black House, including Ed Bullins who would soon take
off for New York. The
BPP began to terrorize so-called
cultural nationalists or those they considered would not
take up armed struggle in the manner prescribed by the
BPP. Musicians departed the Bay for the East coast.
Askia Muhammad was threatened and fled East after coming
to teach at San Francisco State College/now University.
Before my exit the
BPP was next door in Eldridge's room planning their
dramatic and historic to invade the State Capitol in
Sacramento. I was planning my departure from Black
House. My next move was into the Nation of Islam, simply
because I wanted to be involved in a black nationalist
organization that was spiritual as well. Easter Sunday,
1967, I went to Mosque #26 and joined the NOI.
Chapter V
Even before I
joined the Nation of Islam, my
girl/woman/friend/revolutionary lover Ethna (now
Hurriyah Asar) had gone home with me to Fresno and while
there she joined the Nation of Islam, just goes to show
you how far ahead women are—Ethna was always ahead of me
in her dreams and plans—although I am Gemini, there is a
slow side to me, so slow it is like a snail. She was a
Virgo and well grounded in what she wanted as her dream.
She always wanted a nation, a land of her own for us as
a people. She was the child of a step mother who was a
member of the Chicago Communist Party of the USA,
another member of which was Angela Davis. Her mother,
now in her 80s, is still a member of the Communist Party
of the USA.
We need to
understand that there are a large percentage of Blacks
who have no faith whatsoever in the political system of
the USA, despite the election of Obama. Doesn't matter
if they are Communists, Muslims, Nationalists or
whatever, even common people with no ideology, they are
completely alienated from American society and all that
she proclaims to the world. There are blacks in the
marsh and swamps of Louisiana who have no loyalty to the
USA, no matter what you might think.
So Hurriyah
(Freedom) was my partner, guide and mentor as woman,
lover, friend. She had her men and lovers and I had
mine, but through it all we came together when time
allowed and she is my friend now, my very best friend.
She has not lost that feminine touch that so many women
have but don't know to use the language of love.
Hurriyah can totally disarm me with her language of
love, knowing how to whisper to a man and make him
conquer the world. This is what men need today. Forget
that aggressive talk that turns men off, making women
think men need Viagra when men only need the feminine
language of love.
Just come at me
right with the language of love, not that shit yu
learned from the white man or white woman in college.
Talk to me in the language that made grandpa stay with
grandma for fifty years until death, not that neo-modern
language that make Mama leave Daddy with five kids. Then
at the death of Dad, Mom wants the urn with his ashes,
because she loved him more than anyone could ever
understand.
Eldridge told me
how his mother wanted the urn of his father at his
death, even though she had been divorced from him for
years, revealing her unconditional devotion and love to
him, the man who meant so much to her, in spite of his
negrocities (Baraka term).
While in Fresno
Ethna (Hurriyah, Grand lady of BAW) joined the Nation
even before I was ready. During this time in Fresno we
performed Baraka's Dutchman at Fresno State College,
with Hurriyah in white face in the role of Lula.
Actually I got a wig from Fresno's biggest pimp, Marcel,
who came to see the performance at FSU. He said when he
saw Clay (Marvin X) stabbed by Lulait donned on him that
he would not know what to do if one of his white ho's
stabbed him in his hotel room.. Who was he going to
call, the white man, his black brothers? It was then he
threw in his good pimping towel and joined the Nation of
Islam, eventually becoming an Imam and making his hajj to
Mecca. This is the power of Black Arts, this is the
power of the cultural revolution to save souls like
Marcel, to revolutionize pimps and whores.
Chapter VI
A few weeks before my existing Black House, a dramatic event had
taken place in Cleaver’s life. He had gone to Fisk University to
attend a conference with black radicals, including members of SNCC:
Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael), Imam Jamil Alamin ( H.
Rap Brown), Kathleen Neal and others. The police in Nashville, Tenn marched Cleaver onto a plane back to California for
allegedly starting a riot. But the riot was in his soul, his ice
was melting, he had met the love of his life, Kathleen Neal, the
daughter of a diplomat, but she had chosen revolution and would
soon chose Eldridge as her husband, much to the grave
disappointment of her family. After all, what black bourgeoisie
family would want their daughter to marry a former convict and
especially a convicted rapist?
Nevertheless, when he returned from Nashville, nothing but talk
of Kathleen came from his lips. We wished he would shut up
talking about the sister, but our wish didn’t matter to this
madman in love—as though love doesn’t produce madness in
everyone. But EC had the love bug, was strung out like a heroin
addict or meth freak. Kathleen, Kathleen, Kathleen. We were
impressed when she finally arrived at Black House, a fine, high
yellow sister. When I finally met Eldridge’s mother, I saw the
resemblance between her and Kathleen.
After returning from the Fisk conference, his parole agent put
Mr. Soul on Ice under house arrest. I don’t think he was even
allowed to cross the Bay Bridge, so when Ramparts magazine
wanted him to interview Muhammad Ali about the draft, Eldridge
couldn’t go. He arranged for me to go to Chicago instead. It
took several days before I caught up with Muhammad Ali at the
home of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. When I arrived, I was
ushered in the living room and sat down while Ali was in
conversation with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. When Ali came
from the room with Elijah, he said his teacher told him not to
do the interview because he had said enough about the draft,
especially in the white devil’s media which I represented. Ali
said to me, “This is the man I’m willing to die for, what he
says, I do.” Ali asked me if I needed any money, and of course I
say yes.
As I recall, he probably
handed me a couple hundred dollars. I departed the house without
seeing the Hon. Elijah Muhammad, although Sister Clara did come
into the room and nod at me. She was the first lady of the
Nation of Islam and we are still waiting on an authoritative
biography of her, the woman who ran the Nation of Islam for the
twelve years Elijah was away: seven years of flight after Master
Fard Muhammad appointed him supreme minister upon departing.
Even his own brother, Kallot had disagreed with the appointment,
along with other brothers who declared they would hunt Elijah
down and kill him. One brother said he would eat one grain of
rice a day until he caught Elijah. After seven years, Elijah
returned but was then arrested for treason and draft evasion
during WWII, so he was away a total of twelve years. His son
Wallace or Warithdeen was twelve when his father returned, thus
his close identification with his mother Clara and alienation
from his father who he finally denounced when he became head of
the Nation of Islam.
When I returned to the Bay, Ramparts was naturally disappointed
I didn’t conduct the interview, but they got over it and
eventually they did a story on Muhammad Ali’s draft case. But it
was soon after my meeting with Ali that I found myself on the
run behind the draft. While at Black House I had lost my college
deferment because I’d dropped out of San Francisco State
College/University. But after joining the Nation and even before
doing so, I knew I was not about to serve in the white man’s
army. Elijah told his followers to go to prison as he had done,
but I was also under the influence of the Black Panthers.
Eldridge had tainted me with, “We must not only resist the draft
but resist arrest as well.” I soon found myself in Toronto,
Canada as a draft resister, along with several other brothers.
Chapter VII
And so in 1967 I found
myself exiled in Toronto, Canada, actually I was in Hamilton, a
suburb. I was given refuge by Ted Watkins, a pro-football player
in the Canadian league. Ted was my cousin by marriage, actually
his wife Natalie was related to me through my uncle Adam who
lived in Modesto. There was a time in the recent history of
Modesto when most of the blacks were related by blood or
marriage. The late jazz pianist Monte Waters of Modesto was also
related by marriage. But my favorite cousin Carol Lee of
Modesto, daughter of my mother's brother Adam, connected me with
Ted and Natalie who gave me the green light to come to Canada.
They greeted me with open arms when I finally connected with
them after arriving in Toronto.
It wasn't long before I had
converted Ted to Islam. He changed his name to Shahid. Another
conversion was Canada's angriest Negro, Austin Clarke, a writer
who changed his name to Ali Kamal. The great Pan Africanist
Jan
Carew was steeped in too much ideology to be converted, but
Austin, Jan and I came together often for dialogue on events
around the world.
My cousin Ted funded a
publishing project Al Kitab Sudan which released my first
collection of poetry Sudan Rajuli Samia or Black Man Listen.
Eventually I moved from Hamilton to Toronto, renting a room from
singer Salome Bey and her husband, Howard. I was soon joined by
another draftee from San Francisco State College, Oswald, a poet
who had published in Black Dialogue. Another brother in
exile was from Los Angeles, Norman Rockland, who is still in
Toronto today.
Exile is the worse of all possible things, for there is nothing
worse than being cut off from one’s people, especially
when they are struggling to overcome oppression but you cannot
be there with them to share their daily round, their pain and
suffering. Internationalism is fine but one’s national
liberation is always one's priority, even though we know
oppression is worldwide and thus the fight is everywhere. So we
got down in Canada, organizing and spreading propaganda.
Of course the Toronto Star newspaper claimed twenty thousand
black Muslims had invaded from the South (USA). There were about
three of us brothers, and I was soon joined by Sister Ethna (Hurriyah)
who fled an abusive relationship with her husband in
Philadelphia. She had left me soon after we returned to San
Francisco from Fresno and hooked up with a brother she thought
she really loved. Ethna didn't stay long in Toronto because my
money was real funny. Surely you know how women are when a man's
money is funny. After several weeks of committing adultery, she
departed for her hometown of Chicago. I was heart
broken but
stayed the course, a least for a few months.
I furthered my Islamic
training after meeting brothers from the Middle East at Juma
prayer service at the University of Toronto. One of those who
mentored me was
Hussein Shahristani. Hussein was a Shia who
taught me my prayers in Arabic and also told me about the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt who were persecuted for years under
successive governments, including the regime of the great Arab
nationalist Gamal Abdul Nasser. The Brotherhood teachings are
the ideological and spiritual foundation of Hamas which recently
fought a battle in Gaza against the Zionist.
Hussein told me not to
worry too much about events in the Middle East since they have
been going on for thousands of years. He was president of the
Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada and
told me of his desire for a Nation of Islam similar to the
notion of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Hussein became a
nuclear scientist and returned to his native Iraq. He was
persecuted by Saddam Hussein and imprisoned because he refused
to work on Hussein's nuclear weapons program. Somehow he
survived persecution and today is the Minister of Oil and a
close associate of the Grand Ayotollah Sistani.
Meanwhile back in the States, events in the
Black Panther Party
happened rapidly between Panthers and the police. The first
Panther attack was focused on the Richmond police who killed Denzill Dowell, a young black man. The killing of Dowell made
headlines in the first issue of the BPP newspaper, edited by
Eldridge (Minister of Information) and laid out by Emory
(Minister of Culture). Eventually Samuel Napier would become
Minister of Distribution. And then there was the invasion of the
State Capitol with Panthers displaying unloaded weapons which
was legal at the time, i.e., until the Panthers.
The devil always changes the rules when you master the game. And
then there was the shootout between
Huey Newton and Officer Fry
of the OPD in which the officer was killed and Huey wounded.
Reading of events in exile made me happy to be in
Toronto, although I wanted to be home to partake in the
struggle. Eldridge would tell me years later, "Yeah, Huey shot
the pig. We took the gun and threw it into the Bay."
Chapter VIII
We discovered racism was as
Canadian as hockey—and they play a lot of hockey in Canada, you
can see children on the street playing hockey barefoot in the
snow. As Austin Clarke explained in an interview, Canada may not
have been involved in the slave trade and she might not have had
colonies, but West Indian women workers described the journey
from the Caribbean islands to Canada as the Middle Passage. And
upon arrival they immediately became indentured servants with
few rights of protest to harsh working conditions. One need only
read the novels and short stories of Austin Clarke and others to
get a taste of racial conditions in Canada.
We made the mistake of not
understanding the racial dynamics when we held a rally at a West
Indian night club and referred to the white women as snakes.
Little did we know how many biracial children were in the
audience, and they reacted to our racial insensitivity. After
six months, I had enough of Canada; in fact I had renounced my
US citizenship before the American consulate, having had enough
of America as well. A fat man gave me a ride to Ottawa to try to
go to a Third World or Communist country. This same fat white
man claimed he had helped
Robert
F. Williams escape to Cuba when he fled North Carolina ahead
of lynch mobs because he advocated
Negroes With Guns. A fat white man was also supposed to have
helped James Earl Ray escape from Canada to England after the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Well, we know there
are some people who work both sides of the fence, from the right
to the left.
After six months I made
plans to return underground to the United States. I was homesick
especially after receiving a letter from Ethna telling me about
the Black Arts scene in Chicago, even sending me a book signed
by a poet named Don L. Lee ( Haki
Madhubuti). His book inspired me to pack up and make my way
across the border to Detroit, where I was greeted by historian
Harold G. Lawrence and Ahmed Alhamisi, editors of an anthology
on BAM.
From Detroit I slipped into
Chicago where I worked under an assumed name in the Loop,
eventually moving from the North side with Ethna’s sister to a
room on the South side, 57th and Kimbark, Blackstone Ranger gang
territory, walking home nightly knowing my life was in danger
but having no fear, and there was never any incident between
myself and the gang bangers. But one day there was a note on my
door from Ethna’s sister saying the FBI had been to her house
looking for me. I knew it was time to raise up from Chicago, but
I didn’t get out of there fast enough.
August 4, 1968,
Martin Luther King, Jr. was
assassinated and America became a house on fire when North
American Africans reacted nationwide with righteous indignation
at the demise of King and his forever-gone era of non-violence.
Cities burned coast to coast and Chicago was no exception: the
West side went up in flames. When I got up early the next
morning to go to work in the Loop, the South side was under
National Guard occupation, with soldiers in jeeps, tanks, and
military trucks manning intersections, especially along Cottage
Grove, a main drive.
Four days later, we heard
the news from California that the Panthers had a shootout with
Oakland police in which Lil Bobby Hutton was murdered in cold
blood and Eldridge Cleaver wounded.
From his long experience in the California prison system,
Cleaver knew when in confrontation with authorities you come out
butt naked. The young hero of revolution, Lil Bobby probably had
too much pride to come out naked and when he appeared from the
house on 28th and Magnolia, the OPD murdered him in cold blood
after he surrendered. The people released a cry of horror at
what they witnessed. During the shootout other Panthers had
threw down their guns and ran. One Panther leader was found by
police hiding under a bed in a woman’s house.
This cowardice is not
unknown in revolutionary history. There were soldiers who turned
heels and ran while fighting battles with Prophet Muhammad of
Arabia 1400 years ago. As I wrote in a song, “Revolution is not
a pretty thing.” What is worth nothing is that Eldridge told me
after the assassination of MLK, Jr., suddenly black men appeared
at the Panther office crying for guns to avenge the death of
King. He described them as too clean for brothers in the hood.
He said they had the look of military men disguised as common
brothers from the community.
We know Cointelpro or the
FBI’s counter intelligence program was in full swing during this
time. Furthermore, if anyone had anything to do with the
assassination of Dr. King it was the FBI—see BET’s documentary
of J. Edgar Hoover in the American Gangster series.
Chapter
IX
The next time I see Cleaver is in Mount Morris Park,
renamed Marcus Garvey Park, in Harlem. I was now a resident of
Harlem, or at least a worker in Harlem, while living in the
Bronx with playwright
Ed
Bullins, after slipping into Harlem from Chicago
after the assassination of MLK, Jr. Yes, I came up out of the
subway at Eight Avenue, the subway made so famous by
Duke
Ellington and Billy Strayhorn in Take the A Train.
I came up into a sweltering
Harlem summer of heat, sweat and funk, a love funk so beautiful
I never imagined such a happening upon seeing so many beautiful
black people—Chicago was great and there is nothing like
Chicago, especially the South side, but Harlem, the capital of
Black America, the ground Malcolm X walked upon, and Duke,
Billie, Basie,
Parker, Apollo Theatre, awesome
power of my people, the East coast version of what I'd
experienced in Oakland on Seventh Street, Harlem of the West.
Seventh Street was a small
version of what was before my eyes, a sea, a wonderland of Black
people from over the world, Africa. Nigeria, Lagos, Ghana,
Senegal, South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, the Caribbean, Jamaica,
Trinidad, Barbados, all swimming in blackness. And I among them
now, a negro from Cali swimming in the sea of my people, loving
every moment, under the guidance of
Askia Touré, my elder and
teacher, telling me about the
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, telling me more about
the Sufi teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan, Rumi, Ghazali and
others, about the Mukhadimah of Ibn Khaldun and other Sufi and
Islamic masters.
And then there was Sun Ra,
the master of all masters, my teacher, mentor, friend and guide,
who taught me all that one ever needed to know about theatre,
the master teacher of BAM, who told us about traveling the space
ways, and Milford Graves, master drummer who was so powerful he
was banned from downtown, too aggressive, too arrogant, too too
too,
Milford, my main man, and
The Last Poets coming together
to take us to the next level into Rap, Abiodun, Ben Hasan,
Geylen Kayne, David and Filipe,
Barbara Ann Teer
and the New Lafayette Theatre, Ed Bullins and Robert Macbeth and
crew, the Yoruba king, Baba Serjiman who moved to Sheldon, South
Carolina, and
Olatunji,
master drummer of Nigeria, all there in the Harlem madness and
joy,
Amiri Baraka, gone home to Newark but slipping back into Harlem to
continue his light with Larry
Neal, Askia and crew, sane and insane, enjoying the madness
of Harlem summer 68, Nikki, Sonia,
Haki, June Jordan, Mae Jackson
jumping over the broom to marry me, the Prince of Harlem,
Pharaoh Sanders, Archie Shepp and the Ayler brothers, and more,
more, Farrakhan at Mosque #7, Akbar Muhammad and Donald
Cunningham at the book store, the book store of the world at
125th and 7th Aveneue, Mr. what was his name, the master book
seller? Harlem, 1969, a dream come true for a Cali Negro,
swimming in the sea of his people.
Fuck Vietnam and Fuck America. And there was
Cleaver
in
Mount Morris Park saying he would kiss the pussy of
Fannie
Lou Hamer as I stood and watched. And Bobby Seale was at
125th and 7th Avenue, reciting my poem “Burn, Baby, Burn,” and
James Foreman trying to lecture to the people on Franz Fanon,
and on and on and on. And Dr. Ben and John Henry Clarke rapping
on history and consciousness and beyond, etc., etc., etc.
Chapter X
Marcus Garvey Park would be the last time I'd see Cleaver for
several years. Even though I'd found his speech about Fannie Lou
Hamer disgusting then because of my Islamic Puritanism at the
time, today I would agree with Cleaver in bowing down at the
altar of Fannie Lou, that great revolutionary woman from the
Southern liberation movement who challenged the Democratic party
for its unabashed racism at the time. Yes, Cleaver, I would kiss
her pussy too! In his utter madness but searing insight,
Eldridge said, "Nine out of ten women are an insult to a dick."
So Fannie Lou Hamer was that one out of ten women who deserved
praise and honor for valor and steadfastness in the face of
brutal white racist savages in the South.
During his exile, Cleaver met the North Vietnamese General
Giap who defeated America in the Vietnam war.
It must have been not long after his New York speech that
Cleaver
returned to California to face charges for the shootout with the
OPD, or maybe he was supposed to turn himself in as a parole
violator but instead he donned the persona of a woman and
slipped out of his house in San Francisco to reappear in
Castro's Cuba. In Cuba he soon discovered the role of
Afro-Cubans in the history of revolutionary struggle in their
land. Brother Carlos Moore had written about the African role in
the Cuban liberation struggle. And it was in the eastern or
African province of Cuba that the revolution began. Cleaver
learned the white Cubans took over the leadership from the
Afro-Cubans. He would name his son after the great Afro-Cuban
revolutionary leader, Antonio Maceo.
Of course
Robert
F. Williams ( Negroes With Gunsand
leader of the Revolutionary Action Movement or RAM) had preceded
Cleaver in exile on the island. Williams had grown somewhat
disillusioned with the Cuban revolution and slipped away to
China. Cleaver said after associating with the Afro-Cubans and
telling them about Black Power, the Cuban government grew
suspicious of the Panthers and basically wanted them to stop
spreading the ideology of Black Power. Eldridge said they had to
arm themselves with AK47s against the Cuban government when they
attempted to put the Panthers in check. At the time Castro was
pushing the line that all Cubans were one, negating any special
emphasis of Africa or Afro-Cubanism.
This attitude changed when
Cuba decided to help Angola by sending troops to fight the
colonialists. Suddenly, Cuba fully recognized her Africanity and
solidarity with the African revolution. Many Cuban troops died
fighting in Angola and confronting the apartheid regime in South
Africa which supported the reactionary forces in Namibia.
Eldridge slipped out of Cuba after blasting Castro's Latin
racism, but this was Cleaver's MO: to submerge himself into a
phenomenon, study it then expose its contradictions. We will see
this pattern as my narrative continues. He will go from being a
Muslim in prison to Communist to Panther to Christian to Moonie
to Mormon to Republican to Science of Mind to Crack Head. His
life ended before he was able to deconstruct Crack.
He arrived in Algeria and the Panthers were soon given
diplomatic status as the representative of the North American
African peoples. Eventually the Panthers were given a building
that had previously housed the North Vietnam or Viet Cong
embassy--if I'm correct. Thus the BPP was now international and
recognized around the world as a national liberation movement.
With diplomatic status, the International Section of the BPP was
able to meet and greet diplomats from other national liberation
movements around the world, including the PLO, the Chinese,
North Koreans and liberation movements throughout Africa.
Cleaver traveled throughout
the world as a diplomat of the North American African nation.
Kathleen had arrived in Algeria just in time to give birth to
their son, Antonio Maceo Eldrdige Cleaver. Their daughter, Joju,
would be born while on a visit to North Korea.
It was in Algeria that the BPP had to be taught the role of
culture in revolution. After the Algerian International Cultural
Festival, the BPP stopped slamming the cultural revolution in
America because along with armed struggle there must be a
cultural revolution. And as I have written, the BPP had evolved
from the Black Arts Movement. Panther leadership had received
consciousness in BAM, including Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Emory, Sam
Napier, George Murray, et al. They had come through Black House,
BAW and the BSU's Communication Project, directed by Amiri
Baraka when he was at San Francisco State College/University.
Huey Newton had often said I taught him
things, but the only thing I may have taught Huey was street
theatre which Black Arts West and Baraka's Black Arts Repertory
School in Harlem demonstrated. The BPP took street theatre to
its highest level when the Panthers donned their uniform of
black berets, black leather jackets and blue shirts.
Chapter XI
Of course it wasn't
uniforms that made the Panthers shake up the world, but the
presence of armed black men and women on the streets of America,
which took armed struggle in black liberation to another level,
although there was resistance to slavery every day of the
centuries we were kidnapped and terrorized on American soil (see
the History Channel's documentary Slave Catchers and Resisters).
There had been black men and women who took up arms against
racism and white supremacy in the South, e.g.,
Deacons for Defense in
Louisiana and of course
Robert
Williams in North Carolina.
While in Houston, we
visited the Museum of the Buffalo Soldiers and were especially
moved by the 1916 revolt of black soldiers, most of whom were
hanged after they avenged the murder of a soldier by racist
police in Houston. We wonder why resistance history is not the
primary lesson in Black Studies. But the BPP's "street theatre"
told the world black men and women had had enough and would
fight to the death to defend themselves. This is the
significance of the Panthers, that they were willing to defend
community at the pain of death, or as we used to say, "No slave
should die a natural death."
And of course the cultural
revolution backed resistance. Ben Caldwell's play The Job
is about a Negro who came to the employment office to say he
didn't come looking for a job but came to do a job. He proceeded
to beat the white employment counselor to death with a baseball
bat. Maybe we can understand Mixon of Oakland in this light: all
he wanted was a job, yet he obviously came to do a job--we don't
know his ideology but we know he was clearly in Al Ansar
territory, a Muslim cult founded by a former criminal
renamed Master J, who taught his followers from Supreme Wisdom.
Nation of Islam Muslims, Five Percenters, Al Ansar and other off
shoots of NOI teachings know it is basic teachings to kill four
devils, earning one a free trip to Mecca or instant Paradise.
Here in the Bay we had the
Zebra killings who executed this lesson from Supreme Wisdom. In
the early days of the NOI in Detroit, a brother came to the
Mosque with a paper bag, telling the minister, "I got me one."
He had a white devil's head inside the bag. And in the Bay Area
there a innumerable young brothers like Mixon who are steeped in
the Al Ansar teachings. As they say here in Houston, "You better
ax somebody!"
What I must say about
Eldridge, Huey and so many other Panthers who were from the
grass roots, and we can say this about the founding members of
the Nation of Islam, including and especially Malcolm X (may
Allah forever be pleased with him) that Allah went to the lowest
of the low to get the people needed to rock the Good Ship Jesus
America. The edumaked Negroes wanted to do everything except
confront the American beast toe to toe, gun to gun. When Huey
Newton confronted that pig shotgun to shotgun, there was a
paradigm shift in the history of African liberation, especially
after the demise of MLK, Jr. and the Civil "Rites" movement. And
with respect to Muslims in the Nation of Islam, officials said
to me, "We might not carry weapons but we bury weapons."
Of course there were
instances when Muslims engaged in "armed struggle" as well. When
I asked Huey Newton about his connection to the Nation of Islam,
he said, "A Party can be part of a Nation." And of course the
BPP was not lost on the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. He considered
the BPP his children, after all they copied his program almost
word for word. Compare What the Muslims Want and the Panther Ten
Point Program. When I jammed Bobby Seale about this, he went
into denial that the Muslims had any influence on the BPP. But
when I asked what about the influence of Malcolm X, he was
silent and submitted that certainly the NOI influenced the BPP.
But let us get back to
Algeria and Papa Rage. We were told on a trip to cohabitate with
European women, Cleaver was somehow informed Kathleen had a
boyfriend named Rahim. When Papa Rage found out about this, Mr.
Rahim went missing in the Algerian desert. The Panther
newspaper back in the USA showed photos of Kathleen with black
eyes from Papa Rage. Chris Brown and Rihanna are not the first
high profile couples who engaged in domestic violence. One of
the contradictions of the black liberation movement was our
internal violence, especially domestic violence.
We talked black power but
often went home to beat our women's asses, and this was not lost
on the children, many of whom were traumatized as a result and
went on to practice this savage art, including members of the
hip hop generation. Sonia Sanchez likes to say the hip hop
generation is merely putting on stage what we did in private. If
you want a literary version of domestic or partner violence see
Sonia's great book
Wounded in the
House of A Friend or my play In the Name of Love,
especially the poem "Confession of an Ex-Wife Beater."
Now we must bring in
Cointelpro at this time because J. Edgar Hoover is clearly in
this picture. He had FBI agents writing letters to Kathleen in
the persona of a "black sister" informing her of the
infidelities of Eldridge, just as the FBI sent tapes of hotel
conversations between our beloved Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in
hotels with women to his wife.
This was done to purposely
destroy the family life of black revolutionaries, whether Civil
"Rites" leaders as King or revolutionaries like Eldridge. The
FBI wrote letters in Black English to create division in the
ranks of black revolutionaries. And we reacted according to
script. Huey and Eldridge had been driven by FBI division or
"dirty tricks" into a war against each other, ultimately
creating two armies of black men and women who fought each other
coast to coast, with Eldridge's army on the east coast and
Huey's on the west.
As I've said before, I knew
brothers and sisters on both sides of this conflict and it hurt
me because so many friends went down in the internecine
violence, Samuel Napier being the worst example, since I
remember the day he came into Black House as a worker looking
for something to do, or in the words of James Brown, to "Get
Involved." Samuel was murdered in New York then set afire. Lord
have Mercy!
Chapter XII
From afar it looked like
things were really jumping in Algiers, including several
hijacked planes bringing Panthers to the land. We recall when a
group of Panthers arrived with a million dollars but were seized
by the authorities because it conflicted with their national
interests which all governments secure first. In this case the
government was negotiating a billion dollar natural gas contract
with the US so they were not going to jeopardize the contract
for Negroes with a million dollars. Of course this only added
tension and stress to the relationship between the BPP and
Algeria, and eventually the embassy closed and the Cleavers
moved to France.
After seducing the mistress
of the president of France, Eldridge was given refugee status
after she intervened with her man, the Prez. And then things
began to unravel in the Soul on Ice. According to his testimony
when he converted to Christianity, Cleaver had been slowly
evolving from atheistic Communism. He saw the work of God in his
children, how they were a combination of Kathleen and himself.
And in France he saw the
emptiness in their lives, the daily ritual of eating, sleeping
and politics began to lose meaning. He saw darkness in his life,
especially one night while eating dinner by candlelight. He had
also been to all the Communist and Socialist countries and saw
the lack of democratic ideals, where little or no opposition was
allowed, only presidents for life. He knew of the torture
chambers in many African nations, never forgetting his eighteen
years in USA dungeons. But he began to grow disillusioned with
left wing politics, in short, he was homesick and broke.
In Algeria he was informed
that his former lawyer/lover Beverly Axelrod had won by default
his royalties from Soul on Ice.
He had agreed to share his royalties with her as the price of
her helping him get out of Soledad prison. And of course he had
promised to marry her but instead fell in love with Kathleen.
After winning her suit by default since he could not appear in
court in the US, Axelrod gained rights to the best seller's
profits, depriving the Cleavers of much needed finance.
Strangely, the day before his memorial service that I officiated
in Oakland, a mudslide toppled Axelrod's home in Pacifica. I did
not know she was in the audience until I looked at footage of
the video from the memorial.
Cleaver began his attempt
to return home. He contacted his old friends on the left, but he
had caused devastation in the radical community, especially by
terrorizing certain black politicians and the warfare between
Huey and himself that left much bloodshed on the streets of
America, coast to coast. Eventually the Left sent Ron Dellums,
Congressman and now mayor of Oakland to Paris with the message
he was not welcome back in America, that he should forget about
returning and enjoy his life in France, become a Frenchman. This
message sent him into depression.
After the Dellums visit, he
felt hopeless and useless and wanted to take his life. And then
one night in Southern France, he was sitting on the balcony
watching the moon. Suddenly he saw the faces of various
revolutionaries, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Castro and then Jesus. He
broke down, wailing on the thrashing floor. He knew Kathleen had
brought along the family Bible, before which he had no need, but
he said he searched for the Bible and held it in his hands for
dear life. And then he saw the light, something told him he was
going home, no matter what the Left said, no matter what anyone
said. He knew then Jesus was his Savior and Lord. No more
Communism, no more revolution. The storm was over now. He had
his attorney begin negotiations on his surrender to the US
authorities.
Eldridge Cleaver as a Born Again Christian
During my tenure as his chief aide, "I used to tie his tie because he didn't know how, so he would keep it tied and slip it on."
I have known few people as generous as EC, no one who worked harder. He was a Virgo and my moon is in
Virgo, so we got along well. I worked seven days a week with him on the Born Again tour. His wife, Kathleen,
said to me, "Marvin, the girls used to call for you while you were staying with us. But they don't even call any more."
I discovered no woman wants a man who works seven days a week. We worked so hard I didn't have time to cash my check or
get my clothes out the cleaners.
Chapter XIII
Before proceeding with the Prodigal Son's Return to
America, we need to pause to consider what caused this radical
change in Cleaver. Many will say it was simply a tactic to get
back to the US: since the Left would not help him, he switched
to the Right, following Malcolm's dictum of "any means
necessary." The revolutionary puritans would argue getting in
bed with the enemy is over the top, yet did not Muslim women
prostitute themselves in the Battle of Algiers? The Shia say
tell your enemy anything he wants to hear to achieve your
objective. I will say that Cleaver was, among other things,
suffering from exile—it is an inflammation of the heart from
homesickness.
Baldwin talked about how
Richard Wright's exile caused him to become detached from his
roots. Exile is a wretched psychological state that only those
who have done so can fully understand. Of course, Cleaver's
state was more complicated than simple exile. As I noted in an
earlier section, his MO was to have an experience then critique
it to the max, so maybe he was indeed exhausted from revolution,
then after revealing its contradictions, had the sincere need to
move on.
Did not Amiri
Baraka change from so-called cultural nationalism and electoral
politics to Communism? Everything must change, as the song says,
although some changes are more radical than others. In terms of
Communism, he had studied it long and hard in prison, then
experienced it first hand from Cuba to China, North Korea,
Africa and Europe. Certainly after the fall of the Soviet Union,
we must admit Cleaver was not all wrong. And as we see with the
ANC in South Africa, Communists have the ability to suddenly
switch sides to become super capitalists: private planes, Swiss
bank accounts, and European women.
If the reader has not already found this narrative disgusting,
I'm afraid what follows will not be pleasing, especially to the
radical brothers and sisters. I will only try to tell the truth
as I recall it. As far as Cleaver being a sellout, I heard Dr.
Ben (or was it Dr. Clarke) say, "If they paid me enough money I
would sell out too." I don't know how much Cleaver was paid, but
in the end, he rejected all his benefactors and the feeling was
mutual when they realized they could not control this mercurial
personality.
Of course, the election of Obama is something Cleaver would have
been proud to see since embracing America is what he came back
teaching. On the other hand, there are now a plethora of
Cleaver-minded politicos that echo some of the right wing
ranting that Cleaver came home espousing, such as support for
the US military (Haki Madhubuti) and other conservative items,
especially from black Republicans such as Michael Steele. In
short,
much of Cleaver's post-revolutionary philosophy might fit in
perfectly with the present Post-Black era.
Chapter XIV
And so the day arrived when
Soul on Ice returned to his beloved America. He flew in from
Paris to land safely in an Alameda County jail cell. When Judge
Lionel Wilson (soon to become Oakland's first black mayor,
partly the result of organizing by the Black Panther Party) was
asked to lower Cleaver's bail, Judge Wilson said Cleaver was a
flight risk and therefore raised the bail instead of lowering
it. Cleaver shot back that Lionel had made a career of sending
blacks to San Quentin prison and other Department of Correction
hell holes. Of course the Left immediately denounced Cleaver as
a sell out, counter revolutionary, snitch, agent provocateur and
a host of other epithets, mostly unprintable.
One person who came out in
support of Cleaver was Dr. Nathan Hare. Dr. Nathan Hare said he
supported Cleaver because he had fought the white man once and a
man who had fought once might fight again (Dr. Hare being a
boxer while teaching at Howard University). On the other hand, a
lot of his critics had never fought the white man and had no
intention to do so, but simply ran their mouths talking loud but
saying nothing, in the words of ancestor James Brown. I believe
Dr. Hare was part of the Cleaver support committee.
After a short time Cleaver
was able to make bail when a rich Christian insurance man, Art
DeMoss, came to town with a brief case full of stock. Once out
on bail, the Christians swooped Cleaver up and onto the Born
Again circuit, joining other Born Again superstars such as
Charles Colson of Watergate fame, Pat Boone, Hal Lindsey, Jim
and Tammy Baker, Rev. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the
Grand Master, Rev. Billy Graham.
Cleaver was paid four
thousands a shot to give his testimony about how he saw Jesus
Christ in the moon. He called it his "moon shot," but later
changed the title to "The Golden Shower."
I observed Cleaver from
afar, disgusted as were most other revolutionaries with
Cleaver's crawling back on the plantation like a runaway slave
too fearful to enjoy freedom. We clearly understand that he left
because he refused to return to prison after serving eighteen
years. Could his attitude be similar to Louvell Mixon's, who
killed four OPD police because he refused to go back to prison
on a parole violation? Mixon found freedom in death, Cleaver in
exile, so perhaps he was ungrateful he had escaped since there
are other Panthers in exile who probably will never come home,
certainly not in the manner of Cleaver, e.g., Asata Shakur, Pete
O'Neil, and Donald Cox.
But Cleaver rode high on
the Born Again circuit, speaking to thousands at Christian
events throughout America. The Christians rushed into
publication a book entitled Soul on Fire. A brother in
the hood remarked that after Soul on Ice and Soul on
Fire, his next book should have been titled Soul Out!
Chapter XV
After avoiding him like the
plague for weeks or months, don't know how long, then one day I
ran into the devil crossing Market Street near First. I was
probably on a lunch break from doing temp work in the financial
district. I was working at PG&E, typing correspondence between
engineers at the nuclear power plant down the coast at San Luis
Obisbo. The engineers were attempting to prove to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission that PG&E's plant would withstand an
earthquake or a certain magnitude. I could hardly understand the
technical language I was typing but I had enough common sense to
know their explanations and rationalizations sounded like
poppycock.
But there he was coming at
me across the street, a giant of a man, especially compared to
my one hundred and fifty pounds at the time. I couldn't have
avoided him if I wanted so I greeted my old friend, in spite of
his negrocities (Baraka term). He wanted to talk but I told him
I was on lunch break so we agreed to meet for breakfast soon. I
could see the years had aged him since the last time I saw him
speaking in Harlem's Marcus Garvey Park, introducing Fannie Lou
Hamer, 1968. It was now sometime during 1977, nearly ten years
had passed and I could see the stress on his face and the pounds
he'd gained, quite a change from the tall, lean Panther of
yesterday.
When we finally met for
breakfast at a spot on Geary Blvd near Divisadero, he told me of
his need for an administrative assistant. He knew I had office
skills since I had served as secretary of Black House. It was
then that I learned the importance of a secretary in
organizations: they control the flow of information. And hence
they can block information. I used to do so when whites called
Black House, especially his woman Beverly Axelrod and a mad
white boy named Bob Avakian, who now heads the RCP or
Revolutionary Communist Party. Eldridge was his god and he
called constantly for advice. But we most of us at Black House
were black nationalists so we tried to cut Cleaver off from the
whites. Amina Baraka likes to recall at one party how my woman,
Ethna (Hurriyah) told a white woman she couldn't enter the
party. When the white woman said she was part Native American,
Ethna told her the Native American part of her could come in but
the white had to go.
Anyway, Cleaver wanted an
AA, and since I wasn't doing anything substantial at the time, I
agreed to work with him. I hadn't been able to land a full time
teaching job, except serving as visiting professor at UC San
Diego at the invitation of my childhood friend and high school
lover, poet Sherley A. Williams. After teaching at Fresno State
University, I'm certain I was blacklisted even though I went on
to teach briefly at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State and Mills
College. Not only was I blacklisted but my friend Angela Davis
as well.. At San Francisco State she asked me to see if Black
Studies would hire her. When I gave the message to the chair of
Black Studies, she looked at me as if to say, "I don't think
so."
Eventually Angela was hired
to teach in Women's Studies at SFSU. So what was worse: working
for some reactionary uncle tom boot licking black studies
department or for a boot licking uncle tom sellout Negro? If
Eldridge Cleaver was getting money from the government to pay
me, was it any different than the money the black studies
professors received—were
they not agents of the state, certainly they behaved as such
since they had been put into position to block the radicals from
teaching. I saw this happen at SFSU, UC Berkeley and Fresno
State University where I almost lost my life fighting to teach.
At all three campuses the radical faculty was removed and
replaced with pliant Negroes who are still there today.
One of the most important
things Eldridge insisted upon when I began conducting his
affairs with white Christians was that we must be treated first
class, especially in terms of travel and lodging. But the first
task he gave me was not dealing with the Christians but instead
the Jews who were his publicist and booking agent. He told me to
fire them immediately because he was tired and frustrated from
dealing with them.
I learned the Jews had a
communication line that stretched coast to coast, so it was
Jewish news coast to coast that a black Muslim had taken over
the administration of Cleaver's affairs. They wanted to know
what was up with him, had he gone crazy, how could he cut them
out of the action?
But I soon discovered that
Christians only tolerate Jews on the surface. In the deep
structure of the Christian mind is a hatred of Jews for killing
Jesus.
What Cleaver actually
wanted me to do was organize his ministry, the Eldridge Cleaver
Crusades, similar to the Billy Graham Crusades or maybe the
Crusades of the Middle Ages. He wanted to hire black Christians
but we couldn't find any bold enough to join his "crusade." The
black Christians were scared to death the white man was going to
kill Cleaver for running a game on them, and they might get
killed for associating with him. In the end I had to hire a
staff of fearless black Muslims to work with us which became an
embarrassment to Cleaver but he was determined to establish his
own ministry since he saw how the Christians were robbing him in
the name of Jesus.
Charles Colson, Jerry
Falwell, and their gang of thieves were constantly having secret
meetings about Cleaver, mainly how to keep him under their
control. Cleaver joked the Christians had more secret meetings
than the Communists. Naturally they were highly upset about his
staff of Black Muslims, although Cleaver fronted us off as his
first converts and referred to us as heathens. We accepted his
drama, laughing all the way to the bank. Cleaver was a hard
worker and soon I had lost all my girlfriends from being on the
road 24/7. Kathleen said once, "Marvin, the girls used to call
here for you, but they don't call anymore." Don't no woman want
no man who works 24/7. Often I didn't have time to cash my check
or get my clothes out the cleaners as we were on the road from
city to city giving his testimony about finding Jesus in the
moon.
Chapter XVI
My duties included
secretary, driver, body guard, editor of his newsletter and
photographer. As body guard he gave me a 45 automatic which I
carried in my camera bag. Cleaver did not fear anyone, certainly
not his former radical comrades, but we came to not trust the
white Christian mafia we were dealing with. We realized we were
dealing with gangsters and began to act accordingly. Even Art
DeMoss, the rich white Christian who bailed out Eldridge with
his stock, was a "former" mafioso. And Billy Zeoli, a producer
of Christian films was "former" mafia.
When he came to speak in
San Diego, I invited Sherely Williams to attend. When she saw
the white Christians seated on the podium with Cleaver, she
whispered, "Those guys look like gangsters." And sometimes they
used aggressive tactics, especially in regard to the love
offering. Of course they "dipped into the pot," as all Christian
officials are known to do. And often there was a delayed
accounting of the offering. Sometimes they would send us plastic
bags full of money taken after his testimony.
Of course we didn't know
the actual amount of the offering. When he appeared on Jerry
Falwell's Old Time Gospel Hour, after repeated long distance
calls, they finally gave us an accounting of forty thousand
dollars, but they didn't want to send Eldridge the checks
because they could add the names to their mailing lists for more
money—rather than us do the same to expand our list and become
independent. They wanted the power of attorney to cash the
checks. We had to send a man back to Lynchburg, VA to get the
money—I don't think we got the checks.
In short, we didn't trust
them, just as they didn't trust us. On a visit to Canada we were
searched several times reentering the US. Now understand it was
impossible to make a distinction between the Christians and
government agents since they were/are one and the same. During
slavery were not all white men deputized to arrest black men and
women, especially runaway slaves or those breaking the black
codes, i.e., three or more standing around doing nothing as in
plotting or conspiring a revolt?
When we arrived in Seattle
from a speech he'd given in Canada we were taken into a room at
the airport and searched and searched again when we arrived at
San Francisco airport. Apparently the Christians and the
Government (which are one) didn't really know what Cleaver was
about and weren't taking any chances. They didn't know if he was
an agent of some Communist nation such as North Korea, China,
Russia or what, even though he had professed belief in Jesus
Christ.
Sometimes a Christian would
accompany us on the road and we knew he was reporting to the
police. He was a racist devil who stole family pictures from
Cleaver's house that later appeared in the book Soul on Fire.
This Christian devil was an associate of Mr. Clean Christian,
Pat Boone. Cleaver wanted to kill him, especially when a picture
of his mother appeared in the book, but Papa Rage restrained
himself.
The Christians suspected I
was his body guard even though he was twice my size. They would
say to me, "You're not his photographer, are you?" I would
reply, "Of course I am, what makes you think otherwise?" Hell, I
was merely an actor, trained in the Black Arts Movement. My
attitude was too hell with these white Christians, they've lied
to us for four hundred years. And as James Baldwin said to me in
our 1968 interview, "Our condition proves the lie of everything
these Christians say."
The sight of my camera
really brought out their racism, envy and jealousy. When Cleaver
asked me to be his photographer, I told him to get me the best
camera in the world, Leica, the Rolls Royce of cameras. He went
down to Brook's Cameras in San Francisco and paid $2,000.00 for
my camera. Kathleen was mad at her husband for wasting money
like that, but the white devils were even angrier that a nigguh
had such a camera. They would turn red when they saw the label.
It got so uncomfortable I had to put tape over the label to
escape their evil vibes. During our travels I photographed
General MacArthur, Donald Rumsfeld, Senator Frank Church,
Charles Colson, Jim and Tammy Baker and others.
But their constant question
to me was, "Is he for real? Did he really see Jesus in the moon?
Was he on drugs?" I would reply, "Sure, he's for real." And of
course they would ask me when I found the Lord? This usually
happened at dinners after his testimony.
Since I was usually silent,
eventually they would turn to me with the question. I would
reply, "One Tuesday night!" They seemed relieved and continued
their conversation and socializing with Cleaver.
Chapter XVII
The Christians provided the Cleavers with a nice home in
Atherton, near Palo Alto and Stanford University. Atherton is
one of the most affluent areas in California if not America.
Since I was living in Oakland, Cleaver asked me to move in with
them so I could be more accessible, especially since the San
Francisco Airport was only a short distance from Atherton. Even
then we would often be late for a flight, so I would sometimes
drive a hundred miles an hour getting to the airport, and then
we had to run like O.J. Simpson's ad to make the flight.
Sometimes our lateness was due to Cleaver insisting we do a few
lines of cocaine and smoke a joint before leaving to the
airport. And then there were times when we would take turns
going to the restroom aboard the plane to do a few more lines.
Yes, we were flying high in the friendly sky!
Kathleen would usually stay home after I came aboard. The
Cleavers were under a lot of stress from all the difficulties
they had experienced during their revolutionary days and
post-revolution. Being in the house with them exposed me to
their marital tension and stress that would ultimately cause
them to divorce. I remember their children, Maceo and Joju,
asking if it was Christian for a man to beat his wife, since
they had observed their parents fighting. Yes, I saw Kathleen
get slam dunked a few times. Of course I was not innocent of
domestic violence in my life. Now sometimes Kathleen, a most
beautiful woman who stuck by her man through endless
difficulties, was simply out of line. The occasion I remember
most was an interview at their home with European media.
Eldridge was in the middle of an interview when Kathleen came
into the house and interrupted his interview with her comments.
Cleaver had to cut the interview and take Kathleen into another
room to get her out of his business. Please do not think I
endorse domestic or partner violence. It is totally unnecessary
and does absolutely no good. All it does is drain the love out
of a relationship until like the sands in an hour glass, all the
love is gone, gone, gone.
Today I advocate the language of love in male/female
communication: keep the voice low, stay away from the bass. The
verbal is usually a precursor to the physical violence. And then
the children are watching the drama, usually seeing their dad
plummet their mother, making them hate their father and wanting
revenge. And of course the children will come to see violence as
the answer to their male/female problems. As the Cleaver
children asked their parents, where is the love of Jesus Christ
you preach about?
Chapter XVIII
Dancing with the devil had some lighter moments. Going with
Cleaver to the PTL Club (praise the
Lord) was one such occasion. It was a mind blower to arrive in
Charlotte, NC and get picked up by a white limo driver. It
almost made me paranoid. Where is he taking us, to a lynching
and are we the ones to be lynched? How did the descendant of
slaves get to be driven by the slave master's son? A friend's
mother would say because we deserve it, had long ago paid for it
and we must enjoy it, if not for ourselves, then for our
ancestors.
We were driven onto the plantation of Jim and Tammy Baker, two
Born Again superstars who eventually fell from grace for
stealing from the Lord. But while it lasted,
PTL had a great time, living high on
the hog. When we got to the house that was the television studio
there was no doubt the White Man's Heaven is a Black Man's Hell.
The place was lavishly laid out, the carpet so soft one could
hardly walk, gold trimmings and ornaments everywhere, especially
the bathroom. Of course Tammy was decked with thick makeup,
looking more like Dolly Parton than Dolly. But we noticed that
these Christian women wore long dresses like Muslims. And when
the men hugged, it was Muslim style, on both sides of the face.
Jim's sideman grabbed me with a hug that lifted me off the
ground as he was a big fellow and I was a small guy at the time.
I saw Cleaver crack up and he never let me forget how that big
white man hugged me. Cleaver gave his "moon shot" or "golden
shower," which ever you prefer, Cleaver preferred the latter to
describe his testimony. Of course only EC would title his
testimony the "golden shower."
After the show we retired to the big house for the meal, laid
out as only Southerners can do. And the food was so good they
had to introduce us to the cook. You know she was Mama Africa.
And then Cleaver was ushered into another room. Of course I
accompanied him as per his request. In the other room a man
stepped forward and introduced himself. He said he was a former
FBI agent who was there in Oakland the night of the shootout in
which Lil Bobby Hutton was murdered and Cleaver wounded. He said
he had found the Lord and didn't hate black people anymore. He
and Cleaver embraced. And the crowd shouted
PTL or Praise the Lord.
During my time with the devil, there were many occasions when
former or current law officers confessed their previous hatred
of black people but said since being born again they no longer
hated. We were told this in Sacramento at a luncheon with
Christian businessmen. A man stood up to tell Eldridge he was
all over the world tailing Eldridge, in every country EC visited
he was there observing his movement. But he found the Lord and
no longer hated. There were police officers in the Bay Area who
confessed they had murder squads killing Panthers in particular
and black people in general. Supposedly, these officers found
the Lord and Cleaver embraced them.
What I observed was that there were other white Christians who
said they could still hate after receiving the grace of Jesus
Christ. As long as they were born again they could do almost
anything, even murder. Perhaps this is the majority of
Christians. And perhaps this is the reason Rev. James Cone told
Bill Moyers all Christians must come
to an understanding of the cross and the lynching tree.
Obviously white Christians felt they could lynch black people
and still be righteous Christians
Chapter XIX
His speech at Vanderbilt University revealed why I appreciated
Cleaver despite his negrocities (Baraka term). It was a
political symposium with mostly white men as participants,
Cleaver the only black. Others present included Senator Eggelton,
Donald Rumsfeld and others I can't recall, but these white boys
were no match for the erudite and well traveled Cleaver who
discussed global politics with great knowledge and skill than
any of the other presenters, most of whom had not read or
traveled as he had.
Few white men had been allowed into China, North Korea, Vietnam
and Russia, among some of the places Cleaver had gone. And then
his presentation was far more dramatic than the white men. It
revealed how true were the President of Brazil's recent comments
about the blue-eyed people who think they are so intelligent yet
can't solve and are responsible for much of the world's problems
today, from Global warming to poverty, disease and ignorance,
which partly exists because of their greed, selfishness and
desire for cheap labor and resources.
I
didn't see Cleaver as a person but as a symbol of articulate
black men who have had few opportunities to go abroad to see
what's really going on in the world. Here was one of the lowest
of the low, criminal, psychopath, yet genius if he had had a
chance to really excel in life—he
could have been president before Obama. But on this occasion he
spoke on world events with a clear vision of the future, the
possibilities of America if true democracy reigned. Donald
Rumsfeld and his old boys club members were simply no match to
the black man standing tall before them, a man who had come from
the dungeon to the top, fighting in ways they never could or
would. General Douglas MacArthur was there as well, in a wheel
chair but saluted for his valor and victories in WWII.
Chapter XX
I am so thankful for having had a relationship with
Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, and Bobby Seale. They taught me
how to get my nuts out the sand and represent myself as a black
man on the planet. Eldridge, as minister of information, taught
me how to write with force and power, as did Elijah Muhammad and
Mao, and of course Amiri Baraka. But Eldridge taught us how to
resist this devil in our midst, even though he might have been a
devil himself—sometimes
we must fight fire with fire, so he showed us how to move beyond
rhetoric to action, violent action if and when necessary.
It might be true that the pen of a scholar is worth a thousand
ignorant worshipers, but there does come a time to resist
oppression with violence. On the other hand, Martin Luther King,
Jr. showed how to use non-violence as a tactic to defeat the
enemy. Malcolm solved our conundrum with, "Any means necessary."
But isn't it amazing how a group of mostly young brothers from
Oakland backed the pigs up off the backs of black people? They
were intellectuals as well, well read with fearlessness in face
of the beast, and Eldridge was of this lot, no matter his social
psycho pathologies. Eldrdige, Huey, Bobby and thousands of
other Panthers gave their all to the liberation struggle here in
the belly of the beast.
Oakland is today suffering from being under the occupation of
racist pig gangsters who operate under the color of law. What
shall be the response today, especially after Oscar Grant and
Louvelle Mixon? What do the intellectuals have to say, or more
importantly, what shall they do? Shall they give a mickey mouse
response like that of Attorney John Burris, and I say this even
though I consider him a friend, but the truth is the black
people of Oakland should not have allowed Mayor Ron Dellums to
be disrespected at the funeral of those racist brute beasts in
blue uniforms. I abhor violence in any form, but there is a time
for everything, and it is indeed sad to see the streets of
Oakland turned into a war zone, an internal war between the
brothers and an external war with the pigs. It is a dangerous
place to be these days and I am happy to be away for a few days.
Clearly, as in the 60s, the leadership must arise from below and
not from above. The present leaders are part of the problem, not
part of the solution, something we heard from the Minister of
Information, Eldridge Cleaver.
Chapter XXI
There were weeks while on the Born Again circuit that we saw no
black people. Eldridge was only giving his testimony in white
Churches. He appeared more than once at Rev. Robert Schuller's
Hour of Power television show at the Crystal Cathedral—actually
I think the Cathedral was under construction so he spoke at the
old building. We were in the dressing room with Dr. Schuller as
he prepared to go on the air. There were numerous back yard
bar-b-ques where thousands of dollars were raised for Eldridge's
defense since he was still facing charges from the April 8,1968
shootout in Oakland, at which the OPD murdered little Bobby
Hutton in cold blood before a crowd of onlookers who were
horrified at what they witnessed.
At one affair there was a black present, O.J. Simpson's black
wife who was Born Again. O.J. wasn't present.
But again, there were weeks of preaching, praying and eating
with only white Christians. Sometimes a black preacher would be
present but most black preachers had no status especially if
they had not graduated from an accredited theological seminary,
such as Fuller's. A black preacher who said he got called one
Tuesday night did not work with the Born Again crowd. And nor
did most black gospel groups who were simply too strong for the
whites who couldn't stand that strong black gospel sound. Only
Andre Crouch was acceptable at the time. There was no Yolanda
Adams, although the Edwin Hawkins singers might perform on a
program with Eldridge occasionally.
The white Christians were forever trying to control Eldridge,
control him from becoming completely independent of them by
establishing his own ministry, which was the main reason he
hired me.
He had me fire the Jewish booking agent because he was working
Eldridge to death, wanted him to speak in Minnesota during a
terrible snow storm. We were in Florida where it was snowing and
read about a man freezing to death in Minnesota. He told me to
call the booking agent, Harry Walker, and tell him to go to
hell, he was not going to Minnesota. Harry was angry Cleaver
refused to go since it was thousands of dollars involved,
including Harry's 30%. Cleaver refused to talk with him, after
all, he was paying me to talk for him.
And then there was those nice Christian white girls who were
beating down Eldridge's hotel door before we got there. Enough
said!
After weeks of urging, I finally convinced him to speak at a
black church. He had refused all requests to speak at black
churches for a number of reasons, most of them financial. But
there were other reasons such as sound system, air conditioning
and the usual second class treatment blacks live under and
relate to each other with. But finally he relented after Rev.
Ernestine Reems of Oakland's Center of Hope begged me to get
Eldridge to her church on MacArthur, a few blocks from the
recent killing of four police and the suspect Louvelle Mixon.
Before speaking, she wanted us
to visit her facility, so we did. The first thing she did
was point us to the ceiling, showing us bullet holes from the
previous renters, the Nation of Islam under Minister Billy X or
Rabb Muhammad, brother of Dr.. Yusef Bey of Your Black Muslim
Bakery. We don't know why Minister Billy shot into the ceiling,
maybe he was angry about having to move since he had a history
of not paying rent. This is the same brother who had some men
attack sister Nisa Islam when she brought him a message from the
Honorable Elijah Muhammad saying that he must step down. Outside
this building now occupied by Sister Reems, Nisa claims she and
her lieutenants were attacked and beaten. She says she was saved
from death only because Lt. Joan (Tarika Lewis) blocked the
blows to her head.
Anyway, Pastor Reems convinced Eldridge to give his testimony.
After that, he continued speaking at black churches, including
Rev. Don Green's San Francisco Center, and on this occasion
Cleaver's mother was in attendance. But on the whole, going into
the black church was a negative except for the music which was
awesome, compared to music in the white churches which was
totally boring. Black sacred music is beyond this world, except
for the mythology of pie in the sky after you die. It is a
message on one level reflecting our slavery teachings but on a
deeper level it is rooted in Egyptian or African mythology, as
is Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Read Dr. Ben.
But as I've said, the black church was a step down for Cleaver.
Today there are mega black churches but circa 1977, the churches
where he delivered his testimony often lacked proper sound
equipment and most especially air conditioning. One Negro
preacher had Cleaver speak in a high school gym where the temp
outside was over one hundred degrees, yet no air conditioning
inside. Cleaver almost fainted while speaking.
And the black church worked Cleaver like a Hebrew slave or
rather American slave. They would make him speak at service
after service, and then come up with a love offering of a few
hundred dollars. Of course the preacher had to dip in the pot,
as they say. I would sometimes go into a room with the pastor to
count the money, and when I would see the amount it was
laughable, compared to the white church. No wonder Eldridge had
wanted to avoid the black church, but I had insisted he do so,
after all, I was exhausted from the Born Again whites. I mean,
have you ever listened to a white man pray, then compared it
with a black man? Have you ever listened to white people sing,
then compared it with black singing? The only church I know
where white people sing like black people is San Francisco's
Glide Church, under Rev. Cecil Williams. He has niggerized his
mostly white congregation.
Chapter XXII
Cleaver's legal problems were not over and were costing him many
thousand dollars. John Keker was his lawyer for a time. But then
came the Senator Church hearings on the role of Cointelpro or
the Counter Intelligence Program of the FBI, especially with
respect to the Black Liberation Movement, including the Civil
Rites struggle. The Church hearings revealed how J. Edger Hoover
tried to destroy the Civil Rites struggle, including Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. In fact, the FBI had been spying on blacks,
whites and other American citizens since its founding around
1914. The most recent documentary one should see is BET's
American gangster series on J. Edger Hoover as an American gang
star.
He had spied on Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad, trying to
disrupt and destroy both men's activities. With the help of
jealous and envious Negroes he was able to imprison then deport
Garvey. Garvey told us to look for him in the whirlwind for
surely the day would come of Africa's redemption.
We know the Nation of Islam was sugar-coated with FBI agents.
One such agent, John Ali, became the National Secretary of NOI.
Of course there were agents who posed as Malcolm's bodyguards,
helping to carry out his assassination.
And then the Panthers were well infiltrated. The most wretched
example was how Fred Hampton was set up and murdered with the
help of an agent posing as his body guard. And clearly the FBI
and LA police were involved with the murder of Alprentice Bunchy
Carter and John Huggins at the Black Student Union meeting room
on the campus of UCLA. Ron Karenga's US organization was blamed
for their murder. Bunchy was Cleaver's right hand man in prison
and became the Los Angeles leader of the BPP. I don't recall how
Cleaver felt about Bunchy's murder, but the FBI played into it
to heighten the rivalry between US and the Panthers.
And then when Geronimo Pratt
replaced Bunchy, he was set up by the FBI and the LAPD on murder
charges, causing him to spend 27 years in prison, even though
the FBI had phone records and other intelligence that he was in
Oakland at the time of the murder. For years the BPP would not
support G because of his association with Eldridge. I do know
that Eldridge maintained communication with G throughout his
time in prison. I was informed that another Panther sister who
visited G during his imprisonment was working for the FBI. I
won't reveal her name because she confessed to G upon his
release and he forgave her.
After the Church hearings, Eldridge told me of his plan to help
his case which involved producing a pamphlet based on the Church
hearings and distributing it throughout California. He had me
hire a crew of Muslims to travel from the Bay to San Diego
distributing the pamphlet which I helped edit. We, which
included Brother Hasan, Brother Ishmalah and I, traveled through
the central valley towns dropping off pamphlets like we were
Johnny Appleseed. We stopped in little towns like Modesto,
Fresno, Bakersfield, then Los Angeles and San Diego. Not long
after this adventure, Cleaver's case was dismissed. We know the
power of propaganda and though we don't know how much it may
have swayed the DA to drop charges, but we are convinced it
played a role, certainly it didn't hurt.
Chapter XXIII
After seven months on the
road with Cleaver, I was exhausted from travel and the stress of
dealing with the Born Again racists who could justify the cross
and the lynching tree by claiming to be saved by grace. When
Bill Moyers asked Rev. Cone how can your people still love God,
Rev. Cone flipped the question, "That's not the question. The
question is how can they still love you!"
And so I departed the
Cleaver Crusade, a little wiser on what's really going on in the
deep structure of America. I was thankful for the experience but
it was time to move on, although I would hook up with the devil
again before too long. Jet Magazine did a story on my
departure from Mr. Soul on Ice. Khalid Muhammad and other
radical friends were horrified to discover I had worked for
Cleaver, they thought I had gone stone crazy. But I knew God had
taken me down into the devil's dungeon for a reason and I
appreciated the knowledge. How many other so-called Negroes had
the opportunity to associate with the likes of Charles Colson,
Rev. Jerry Falwell, Donald Rumsfeld, Pat Robertson, Jim and
Tammy Baker? And there would be more to come when I reconnected
with Cleaver further on down the road.
Meanwhile, if the devil
wasn't through with the Born Again crowd, they were surely
through with him after he declared his independence from them by
designing and marketing his infamous "dick pants."
Eldridge clearly had a
fixation with the penis or phallus. He saw the gun as the
extension of his phallus, some would say. But taking a page from
fashion history, he designed pants with the codpiece,
emphasizing the area of the male sexual organ. Believe it or
not, after all the hoopla was through, he had revolutionized
fashion history because thereafter there would be more focus on
the genital area in fashioning men's briefs and pants. Of course
Frederick's of Hollywood stole his idea and ran for a touchdown.
Truth is that traditional
Western men's pants are uncomfortable in that area as they lack
a resting place for the genitals. Cleaver's pants provided that
space, but the Born Again crowd went berserk. They sent
Watergate crook, now Born Again King, Charles Colson, to consult
with Cleaver. But by this time it was too late, Cleaver had made
his decision to separate himself from the Christians. And his
pants symbolized his defiance and freedom from them.
Around this time or soon
after, Kathleen separated herself from her loving husband,
eventually enrolling in Yale law school. After graduation, her
first case was divorcing Eldridge. It was after a visit with his
children in New Haven that Eldridge told me about a Negro
intellectual at Yale, Skip Gates who would describe the Black
Arts Movement as the shortest literary movement in history. He
failed to add that it was the most powerful, radicalizing the
teaching of not only black literature but ethnic and gender
literature.
For sure, Eldridge was a
media master and his pants were the talk of the nation if not
the world. When he moved his fashion operation out of Hollywood
back to the Bay, I spent a little time with him. He hired my
friend, Cynthia Mack, to help manufacture the pants. I'd hired
Cynthia to work with us during his Born Again days. She was a
beautiful black woman who had been taught to hate herself by,
among other people, her grandmother who told her she was black
and ugly. Eldridge loved Cynthia and tried to hit on her, being
the sexual psychopath that he was. Now if I had hit on Kathleen
that Negro would have killed me.
When Cleaver tired of his
fashion trip, he gave Cynthia the four industrial sewing
machines he owned. Cynthia deserved them as she was a designer
herself, she made her own clothes since childhood. Cynthia had
been helpful on the road with us since she was psychic and could
tell when "somebody" had been in our hotel room and searched
through our luggage.
She was our intelligence
officer, plus the white Christian women could not stand her
because she matched their racism with her unforgivable blackness
and hatred of white women. We can imagine what white women are
going through now that a black Gullah woman is in the White
House.
Chapter XXIV
Many months passed before
I would see the devil again after one of our frequent mutual
partings, the first being at the fall of Black House. Departing
my duties as organizer of his ministry, I retired to my hometown
of Fresno CA for a little R and R, which gave me a chance to see
my children, siblings and Mom. Mom was a follower of Mary Baker
Eddy's Christian Science, so she was blessed with spiritual
insight which told her Eldridge Cleaver was the worst of all
possible persons, and she didn't believe him for one moment.
She found him disgusting as
a person claiming to represent God, Jesus Christ or anyone else.
Mom couldn't understand why I was associated with any of my
radical or artistic friends, several of whom she had met,
including Bobby Seale, Sun Ra, Eldridge Cleaver and others. She
said, upon looking at them, they weren't nothing, had no class
and why in the world was I hanging around with them? "I thought
I taught you to have more intelligence than that, boy!"
She told me I didn't need
them nigguhs, them nigguhs needed me and they were just using my
mind. She said, "Boy, use the mind God gave YOU!" and leave them
nigguhs alone. Of course it was hard for me to take Mom
seriously because her real estate business was 99% black people,
so how could she tell me to leave nigguhs alone? Damn near every
black person in Fresno will tell you they bought their first
house from Mom and Dad during the late 40s or early 50s, ( until
Dad lost his license for misappropriating funds from their real
estate business to feed his gambling habit.)
At the same time they
published the Fresno Voice, one of the first black newspapers in
the central valley. My father (who married my mother when she
was twenty and he was forty) was a Race Man who had heard Marcus
Garvey in Los Angeles, sometime during the 1920s. Dad claimed he
was born in 1900 and fought in WWI. He was born in Kentucky so
we grew up eating rice instead of grits. Obviously he passed
some of his consciousness on to Mom, even though she had grown
up in Fowler, nine miles south of Fresno, a nearly all white
farming community of raisin growers, with cotton nearby.
My maternal grandparents
were cotton pickers, my mom and even I picked a few pounds but
found it difficult. Now I enjoyed cutting grapes, at least you
could eat them while cutting. That's how children in the valley
earned money for school clothes. Today in the valley very few
blacks are involved in agribusiness, even though California's
central valley is the richest agricultural area in the world. I
call it the Neo-Nile Valley. How can we live in such an area and
not be involved in farming and growing? Something has to be
wrong with our heads, and I blame our leadership, especially
black educators. What if we lived in a gold producing area yet
were not involved in mining? We are a nation of forty million
people totally dependent on others for our food supply.. Black
farmers are rapidly going the way of the dinosaur.
Mom attended a nearly all white church, but never allowed white
people in her house. She employed white men to do work for her
real estate business but never allowed them in her house. But as
a result of her white Christian Science which she subjected many
of her children to (except my older brother and myself who
rejected outright her message, even though it affected us
subliminally because every word from Mom's mouth was Christian
Science), several of them mated with whites, to the great
disappointment of Mom. When one of my sisters started dating a
white man, Mom was horrified because he was a "broke white man."
She wanted to know what the hell my sister knew about white men
that would make her desire to date and later marry one who
continued to call her "his nigger bitch," even to my face, but
how could I protest when my six sisters referred to themselves
as bitches and of course I picked up their language in my
socialization.
But the most important event that occurred during my R and R in
Fresno was meeting and hooking up with one of my childhood
friends, Karen James, one of my sister's friends but I was not
interested in my sister's friends since everything was based on
ones age grade, just as I did not associate with my brother's
friends, even though my brother is only a year older than I am.
So I paid little attention to my sister's friends even though
they were beautiful—in
truth I had my eyes on them as they later told me they had their
eyes on me, and Karen was no exception.
During my RR we hooked up
and became mad lovers, although I only had six months with her
as her man was about to get out of prison and he was a gangster
who was busted for operating a nationwide drug dealing
syndicate. Yes, I fell in love with a gangsta's bitch, as they
say. This was obviously a dangerous affair which only meant that
I continued living on the edge as I've done throughout my life,
the razor's edge to be precise.
But aside from Sherley Williams, Karen was one of the smartest
women I met in my life, she argued with me toe to toe on every
point. I have told of her in my autobiography Somethin Proper,
so there is no need to repeat what I said there, but Karen
challenged me, especially when I made the glaring generalities
that I'm known for. And after six months her man was released
and she had to submit to him and cut me loose since she was a
material girl and I was a poor poet. After a few months of
playing the other man and engaging in quickies while on her way
to the store, I left Karen and Fresno broken hearted and found
my way to Reno, Nevada searching for employment and being in the
company of my brother Ollie and father. It would be the last
time the three of us would be together in this life.
Chapter XXV
Reno, the Biggest Little
Mississippi in the World! A few months after I arrived in Reno,
Nevada, the bastion of conservative America, headquarters of the
Reagan Revolution, the devil would appear, but let me lay the
groundwork for the devil’s appearance. I came to Reno looking
for work and there was plenty work, help wanted signs were
everywhere, especially in the hotels and casinos. After no luck
in that area I sought out work at the University of Nevada and
got a part time job lecturing in English, then was hired to
teach Technical Writing at Nevada Community College, then was
hired at UNR in the Upward Bound program. But I still needed
more money so I contacted the two people I recommend every one
should know when they enter a town: the banker and the preacher.
The banker is good to know
because if he becomes your friend you might be able to be
overdrawn and still withdraw money—ask the Wall Street robber
barons about their banker friends, and the preacher is the man
to know because he knows everyone. The preacher directed me to a
full time job as a community planner with Cloyd Phillips at his
Community Services Agency. I wrote proposals for grant funding.
The job taught me about details in life. Details will kill you.
I remember when my sister Debbie had a bar-b-que but forgot one
thing: toothpicks. Details. As a planner, I was forced to deal
with details. Actually it helped my writing skills.
But when I first arrived it
was a joy being with my dad and brother, since it had been quite
a few years since we’d been together, my brother so often in and
out of prison since his teenage years when he began visits to
the California Youth Authority, then graduated to the Department
of Corrections. Not long ago I was rapping with my homeboy from
Fresno, Willie Sundiata Tate about my brother, Ollie. He said
the last time he saw Ollie was San Quentin, 1968. Wille Tate is
one of the San Quentin Six.
Anyway, Ollie was doing his thing pimping
white girls in Reno. He had an apartment and briefly dad and I
moved in with him until we found a room and later an apartment.
Dad had come looking for work as well, but in reality dad came
to do his favorite pastime, gambling, mainly playing that old
folk’s game, KENO. Dad would stay up all night, sometimes in the
bathroom going over KENO tickets.
My brother did nothing all
day while his white girl worked two or three jobs. Eventually
Ollie got a job out of boredom, although he would often be found
at the Casino playing Poker. Gambling did not interest me,
especially after losing a few rounds at the blackjack table,
partly due to the free drinks and the dealers changing every
thirty minutes. I knew I had to stay out of the casinos before I
caused a riot after losing and realizing I was a sucker.
At the University I was one
of three blacks and most of my students where white except for
the Upward Bound students. My white students treated me royally
and since I had a class full of young white girls, it wasn’t
long before I began dating one, after all these girls used to
sit on the front row with their legs gapped so I could not avoid
seeing their panties or private parts if and when they failed to
wear panties. How could I concentrate on teaching English under
such adverse conditions? And I could tell they were upper class
as they came to class in silk blouses and adorned with gold
chains. One student would soon become an intern for Senator
Laxalt, Ronald Reagan’s best friend.
The girl that was
“assigned” to me was Mary whom I called Mary 2 since that was on
her car license plate. When I invited Mary 2 to my brother’s
apartment, he was shocked that I was cohabiting with a white
girl since he knew me as a Black Muslim who called white girls
the devil and the skunk of the planet earth. But I saw that Mary
2 was fighting the racism of her family—her father was a
professor at UNR and her mother taught her “niggers are bad
news.”
Mary and her girlfriends
had discovered quite the contrary: they found the black athletes
were very good news and so she was fighting to overcome her
addiction to white supremacy. She informed me how the black
athletes were treated at UNR. She said she saw them being given
plates of cocaine and other gifts by the friends of the UNR, in
particular older white women, under instructions of their white
brothers. I had one of the star black basketball players in my
class who was totally illiterate but instructors were ordered to
pass them since they were a source of income for the university,
in short, they were slaves. This goes all in all American
colleges and universities: athletes, especially blacks, are a
major source of funding for the universities, with coaches paid
millions as opposed to the poor righteous teachers.
I moved into my own
apartment with dad—but he soon returned to California at the
first snow, also because I was shacking which he opposed,
believing in the old school marriage.
Before I started shacking
with a sister, Mary 2 used to come over. I soon discovered her
cooking skills were abysmally lacking, along with her skills at
giving head. The poor girl couldn’t boil water without burning
the pot! But let’s not be racist about girls and their cooking
skills. That summer my children came to visit and they met all
my “women.” I had a black sister who came over to visit and
every time I asked her to cook would burn shit up and set off
the fire alarm. I don’t know what was wrong with Ifetayo,
except totally insane yet trying to be helpful.
My oldest daughter,
Nefertiti, who was seven or eight at the time cried, “Dad,
please don’t let Ifetayo cook, she burns up everything.”
Nefertiti also commented on my licentious lifestyle, “Dad, you
take one and bring another!” And when she saw Bernice from the
Upward Bound program, Nefertiti said, “Dad, she’s just a baby!”
although she was eighteen. But Bernice was another basket case,
traumatized as the result of being raped by her father and
brother in law. When we tried to have sex her body went into
contractions. I had moved her in with me briefly, teddy bears
and all. She soon returned home but called me in the middle of
the night to come get her because she was about to commit
suicide. I drove over a hundred miles to pick her up.
When I was finally visited
by Eldridge Cleaver, first thing he said was, “Marvin, you have
picked all the lilies in the field.” As a present, I gave him
Mary 2, since she lacked the skills I loved, but I told Eldridge
she had a hot head, since I knew he loved head. He had told me
that Elaine Brown had the hottest head in the world, that she
had served him on every continent. You know how players play!
And if you don’t know, as they say in Houston, Texas, “You
better ax somebody!”
Chapter XXVI
As opposed to the Christian
mafia, the Mormon mafia in Reno, Nevada treated me royally,
laying out the red carpet. With respect to the white girls at
UNR, my department head called me in to inform me I had been
observed dining with Mary 2 at Harrah's Steak House. Mary 2 had
a break down because I hit on one of her girlfriends, so she
snitched to the English department about it. Of course I denied
having anything to do with her. The chair told me they didn't
mind me dating graduate students, but leave the freshmen alone.
I agreed.
As I was saying, the Mormon
mafia supported my activities in Reno. Through the Nevada
Humanities Committee, I was awarded two planning grants from the
National Endowment for the Humanities to produce two conferences
mainly for the black community of Reno or Washoe County which
had a population of 2,000 in 1978 as opposed to the much larger
black population in Las Vegas. The first conference was
Excellence in Education which featured Dr. Yacoub, (fat head
Harry Edwards), and the devil himself, Eldridge Cleaver. The
conference was well attended by the community and Eldridge
wanted to hang around Reno afterward.
Actually a black preacher,
Rev. Vincent, donated twenty acres of land to Eldridge a few
miles from Reno beside Lake Lahonton, Silver Springs, Nevada.
The Rev. was married to a rich white woman and she agreed to
support Eldridge. Eldridge announced to the world media that he
was going to build a spiritual center on the land and began
planning his project, but was soon the subject of controversy
when the local residents objected to his presence. At the
community planning meeting, I had to speak in his place about
his plans. The locals were up for a hanging and were very
disappointed he didn't show.
They began putting pressure
on Rev. Vincent and his wife to withdraw the land deal and
ultimately he did, somewhat fearful of his life.
As I said, the Mormons were
treating me royally until the devil appeared, and even then
their wrath was not upon me but on him. Nevertheless, before
long he moved in with me, bringing with him a metal trunk full
of guns.
I continued teaching and
working at the Community Services Agency. I was running through
a lot of money partying at my house and inviting other blacks up
from the Bay, including Cynthia Mack and brother Mustafa Abdul
Rahim, my top Arabic student when I taught elementary Arabic to
brothers in the hood in Oakland. Eldridge and Mustafa ate and
drank on me but I appreciated their company. My father had gone
back to the Bay at the first snow and my brother Ollie had
departed for Seattle with his white girl who bought him a new
Cadillac when he arrived.
The second conference I
planned and produced was cultural. Participants included Dr.
Wade Nobles, the Wajumbe Dance troop of San Francisco, including
Nantizi Cayou, Janice Cobb (now Dr. Ahimsa Sumchi); Fahizah Alim
of the Sacramento Bee, writer/critic Sherley Ann Williams
and the devil. Sherley and Eldridge didn't get along too well
after she saw him and Mary 2 together. She told him he was
disgusting for cheating on Kathleen, although Kathleen was long
gone, had separated and in the process of divorcing him. Sherley
didn't know I'd given Mary 2 to Cleaver. If she had she really
would have been through with me. As it was, she told people
about our relationship, "Marvin and I are friends and sometimes
we fuck." And on this occasion we fucked and the next morning
Cleaver jammed Sherley since she had jammed him for adultery. He
charged her with fornication after hearing her screams in the
night. Sherley shut up messing with Eldridge after that.
One day my boss at the CSA
called me in to tell me he had just left a meeting with state
officials who told him to inform me that if Eldridge Cleaver did
not leave the State of Nevada they were going to kill him. I
gave Eldridge the message and he soon packed up and returned to
California.
Eldridge had gone from the
Christians to the Moonies, Rev. Moon's cult of brainwashed
children fleeing from sexual abuse in Christian homes. Rev. Moon
had a powerful theology that taught the unification of world
religions with him as the new messiah. He wanted Cleaver to be
his point man to the Americans because he said the black man was
going to one day rule the world again, but with Asian tutelage,
himself, directed from Paradise, i.e., South Korea. I had gone
to a few Moonie meetings with Eldridge and observed their
brainwashing process, directed by a crew of Jewish psychologists
trained in behavior modification.
First they approached a
victim on the street with the love bomb, warmly hugging the
person and rubbing him/her softly, making them feel there was
possibilities of sex if they would come to the "house," which
was actually a Moonie indoctrination center. When the person
arrived at the house looking for sex, they would instead be
ushered into a meeting room with a lecturer teaching Moon's
theology. While the invitee listened, the invitor would again
apply the love bomb to the person by sitting next to him/her and
hugging and rubbing them as they sat there fascinated at the
heavy knowledge the Moonie lecturer was dropping.
The person would
soon become attracted to the unification theology and afterward
would be fed a delicious Moonie meal of crap food, but the
person would be so excited and uplifted by the new theology and
the love bomb they would be ready for the next stage, a visit to
the Moonie retreat center in northern California at Boonesville.
Boonesville is where they subjected the person to intensive
brainwashing night and day until they broke down and accepted
Rev. Moon as their savior. Part of the brainwashing included
deprivation of sleep, a well known technique, even used by pimps
to turn out whores.
Eldridge was subjected to
the entire process but it had no effect on him because he had
experienced behavior modification in the California prison
system and observed it while visiting Communist North Korea. His
daughter Joju was born there, hence her Korean name. So Eldridge
was able to resist their brainwashing, although he did allow
them to give him a new name, Paul, as in the Bible. Saul turned
to Paul when he had a miraculous conversion on the road to
Damascus. Moon said Cleaver had had a similar life, going from
Communist Christian hater to Christian convert. Moon was
extending his spiritual journey.
But Cleaver realized what
Moon was doing to the children of America and attempted to
reverse the process. When the Moonie girls gave him the love
bomb, Cleaver applied it back to them, essentially turning them
out and rescuing them from Moon's cult. He actually saved
several lost and turned out white youth, reconnecting them with
their parents. Sometimes the parents paid Eldridge for
kidnapping their children and returning them. Of course there
was first a detoxing process which mainly involved letting them
sleep since they lacked and were deprived of sleep in the
process of becoming a Moonie. They were also never left alone.
I observed the Moonies
following Eldridge into the restroom at his house. The objective
is to never leave the person alone so they can think about
what's happening to them. Needless to say, when Rev. Moon
learned Cleaver was turning out his people he was very upset,
especially when Cleaver seduced his brainwashed white girls.
What do you expect when you allow the fox to guard the hen
house?
Chapter XXVII
And then shit hit the fan
in Oakland. For several months I would read the San Francisco
Chronicle to keep up on news in the Bay. The OPD had been
killing a black man a month and I was getting disgusted reading
about it. After all, I was on a magic carpet ride in Reno,
living the life of a licentious fool, taking a break from
revolution, but one morning I saw the headlines about yet
another black man killed by the OPD. I threw the newspaper down
in disgust, but picked it up later for some reason, then turned
to the back page to find my friend and best Arabic student,
Mustafa Abdul Rahim in a photo with his sister, Charla Black.
They were protesting the OPD murder of their 15 year old
brother, Melvin Black. I was horrified and screamed. I couldn't
believe what I was reading. It was totally crushing because the
photo revealed the pain and sorrow on the face of my friend and
his sister.
I made a call to our mutual
friend in the Bay, Rasul Taifa, who told me it was time for
revolution and to bring my ass back to the Bay ASAP. He let me
know the pain my friend and his family were experiencing,
especially since Melvin Black was the baby boy of the family.
"Come on, Marvin X, it's time to get down for Black Nationalism,
leave them KKK alone in Reno and get yo ass down here!" I said,
"Ok, Taifa, I'll get back to you." I knew my party was over in
Reno and soon I was on the road back to the Bay. When I arrived
I saw that all the brothers were ready to do something in
revenge.
We talked with Julian
Richardson of Marcus Books and he told us to exact revenge and
that we were cowards if we did not. Well, to Julian's disgust,
we did not. Instead we organized a human rights rally at Oakland
Auditorium. I called Minister Farrakhan to attend and he agreed.
I called Angela Davis, Oba T'Shaka, Paul Cobb, Desey
Woods-Jones, JoNina Abrams, editor of the BPP newspaper. And of
course Eldridge wanted to attend since he knew Mustafa. When I
approached Huey Newton he initially agreed only if he could
speak before or after Eldridge. Angela Davis didn't want to be
on the stage with him. Huey never showed but we gathered five
thousand blacks into the auditorium from 12 noon to midnight
without incident.
Eldridge gave a powerful
speech after the heckling died down; in fact, he was applauded
for his remarks denouncing Oakland's first black mayor, Lionel
Wilson for not attending. He denounced Congressman Ron Dellums
as well, tracing the history of Democratic party Negro
sycophants.
All the speakers denounced
the OPD as racist pigs, some calling for a police review board
which was later established but is weak as water even today. The
main speaker was minister Farrakhan, but he was preceded by
Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansur who went on and on about
establishing a Pan African state in South Africa. I was forced
to grab the mike from Al Mansur (aka Donald Warden) after
Farrakhan called me into the green room and told me if I didn't
get Al Mansur off the mike he was was leaving immediately for
Chicago. So I went to Mansur and gently eased the mike from his
hand and told the audience the minister was about to speak and
the crowd exploded with applause. The minister was escorted on
stage by Khalid Muhammad and Minister Billy X (Rabb Muhammad).
The minister reiterated the
words of Eldridge, lambasting the absent mayor and congressman,
calling them pitiful examples of black leadership in a time when
the people are suffering. Following the words of Julian
Richardson, Farrakhan said there comes a time when the
temperature of water reaches the boiling point and the black
people of Oakland had reached that point and would be justified
in executing revenge. The crowd applauded loudly.
Mysteriously, after the
Melvin Black Human Rights Forum, the OPD killing of blacks
ceased, but what followed was the appearance of Uzis and Crack
cocaine on the streets of Oakland, including drive by killings
that have continued to this day.
I have called for employing
young men to secure their community, similar to the model used
in Iraq to pacify the insurgents, especially in
Anbar Province. I have additionally called for setting up a
program of micro loans to help the impoverished young men and
women come up. A few hundred dollars can put a brother on the
road up from poverty. This concept is being used around the
world to bring people out of poverty. The founder of the
concept,
Muhammad Yunus, was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
It is obvious to any thinking person that more police and armed
guards who are not from the hood will not suffice.
Chapter XXVIII
As a result of the rally
and a press release I sent out demanding five million dollars
for the family of Melvin Black, the NAACP lawyer, Nathaniel
Calley demanded a million dollars for the family, but since he
was an associate of Mayor Lionel Wilson, moved to have the venue
changed from Oakland to Sacramento where the case was buried
until the statue of limitations almost ran out. The Melvin Black
family contacted me to rev up the case so I did a PR campaign on
their behalf, putting the case back in the news after Nathaniel
Calley purposely buried it at the compliance of the the Mayor in
a black bourgeoisie conspiracy against the grass roots people of
Oakland.
But I had an agreement with
Mustafa and the Black family that I would receive a commission
for my efforts at getting a just compensation for the family.
When they hired a new lawyer, he eventually was able to get an
$800,000 law suit against the City of Oakland. The family gave
me nothing for my effort although I did not pressure them for
anything. Never the less when they won their suit I did not
receive a thank you note or a chicken wing dinner. I did not
press the issue since I saw the family was ignorant and had no
sense of how to compensate someone who had helped them win a
nearly million dollar law suit. If fact, Mustafa and his family
hated me for helping them in their hour of need. This only
showed my Mom was right when she told me to leave nigguhs alone,
that they were only using my mind. Mustafa and I nearly had a
shootout at his house in the projects on Union Street across the
street from Acorn Projects. Eldridge had to intervene between us
to stop us from violence.
This revealed to me that
you simply cannot help some people because of their ignorance,
envy, and jealousy. They will actually hate you for helping
them. But no matter the Black family had won their lawsuit after
my energy and effort and that of other community brothers and
sisters. They took the money and ran into their darkness. The
mother bought a condo by Lake Merritt and she gave each of her
children ten thousand dollars which several of them spent on
Crack.
My mother said I deserved
something for my efforts in their behalf but I let it go and
Allah continued to bless me in ways that I didn't need anything
from the Black family. As the Qur'an says, "Leave them alone in
their inordinacy, blindly wandering on." And it says further,
"We feed you for Allah's pleasure, we desire from you neither
reward nor thanks."
Chapter XXIX
Rev. Moon wanted "Paul" to speak at a
Moonie Conference in Jamaica. Cleaver asked me to handle the
negotiations. My counterpart was Rev. Moon's right hand man,
Col. Pak, publisher of the Washington Times, although I
don't think it was out at this time, 1979. At first Col. Pak was
only going to pay for Cleaver's ticket, but as per usual,
Cleaver wanted me to travel with him, so since Col. Pak was
resisting, I refused to answer his phone calls or return calls
for several weeks. He left messages saying I was a very
difficult man to contact. But I was being difficult on purpose.
When we finally conversed again, he agreed that I should go,
additionally he wanted Mrs. Cleaver as well. We agreed but this
presented a crisis since the Cleavers were separated or divorced
by this time. We tried telling Col. Pak Mrs. Cleaver wasn't
available but they insisted she come, so we told them we'd get
back to them on this matter while we figured out what to do.
We came up with Hurriyah's
friend, Nzingha, a fairly light skinned sister who might pass
for Kathleen—all
Negroes look alike, right? When it was almost departure time
Col. Pak called to say we could take a delegation of six people,
so I scrambled together a crew of six, including Cleaver,
Nzingha, Hurriyah, Hasan James, Rasul Taifa and myself. The
brothers had two or three days to get their passports and meet
us at the airport. We landed in Montego Bay and checked in at
the conference hotel Royce Hall.
As per the African American
tradition, once checked in, we wanted to find the dope as in
ganja, so we sought out the brothers on the periphery of the
hotel who were "bald head" dred because they didn't want trouble
from Babylon police, so they cut their hair but they were Rasta
just the same and they had all the dope we wanted and then some.
They also had art work which Cleaver began to purchase. We told
them we were writers and that I had a suitcase full of books I'd
brought to trade. They told me to go get my books on black
consciousness and I could get all the ganja I wanted. Thereafter
they called me "culture teacher" and wanted me to share
knowledge with them and didn't want me to leave Jamaica because
they said they needed culture teachers.
These were young brothers so I reflected on youth back in the US
who were sometimes difficult to reach with conscious knowledge.
Elijah Muhammad used to say he could teach blacks outside of
America in six months while it would take six years to reach and
teach black Americans because they were hard headed, stiff
necked, deaf, dumb and blind and in their arrogance perceive
they know everything, yet they know nothing. As Khalid Muhammad
said once (may he rest in peace), "How can Jesse Jackson say I
am somebody when he doesn't know who he is, so how can he be
somebody?"
But I must say lately that black American youth are seeking
conscious knowledge. I've had young men and women spend thirty
and forty dollars to purchase my books. And I was shocked and
proud. One young brother held me up in a fish cafe for at least
two hours questioning me on a variety of topics. He said he did
so because he didn't know when he was going to see me again. He
also said he quit his girlfriend because she didn't like to read
and he was a reader.
Meanwhile back in Jamaica, Eldridge spoke in the "Hellfire" Room
at the hotel. It was a great speech, so powerful all the hotel
workers stopped in to listen intently. Essentially he asked why
have Christians allowed Communists to be the Good Samaritans of
Latin America? He said you cannot blame the people for turning
to Communism when the Communists are the ones who've given them
the rope to climb out of the hole of poverty, ignorance, and
disease. The Jamaican hotel workers applauded loudly, but at
breakfast the next morning, which was soon a private
conversation between Col. Pak and myself, everyone else was
asked to leave, including Cleaver, Col Pak said, "Mr. Jackmon,
you tell Mr. Cleaver his speech too radical, too radical."
I just laughed to myself.
And then he and I got down to the business at hand: Rev. Moon
wanted "Paul" to make a world tour condemning Communism, but
when I presented our figures for doing such a tour, Col. Pak
said, "Mr. Jackmon, your figures are unacceptable,
unacceptable!" I informed him that Mr. Cleaver could not and
would not risk his life making a global tour to condemn his old
friends in the Communist world for pennies. The more our
conversation continued, the more Col. Pak repeated this line,
"Mr. Jackmon, you very difficult to deal with, very difficult.
And you were a very hard man to reach, Mr. Jackmon, very hard
man." Thus ended our negotiations on the world tour.
Nzingha and Hurriyah wanted to visit Kingston. I refused to go
because I had seen enough poverty in Mexico and Central America.
I mean how much do you need to see of people suffering before
you understand what's really going on. But Hurriyah was in the
process of adopting a child whose family could not afford to
feed him, so she had good reason to visit Kingston. The ladies
took off for Kingston since we would be in Jamaica six days. I
think Cleaver finally told the Moonies Nzingha was not Mrs.
Cleaver. They didn't trip. After the Jamaica conference,
Eldridge phased out his association with the Moonies. It appears
after Rev. Moon couldn't get Eldridge to be a whore for his
anti-Communist agenda, we next see him developing an association
with Minister Farrakhan.
Farrakhan's Million Family March was reported in the San
Francisco Chronicle as "a Rev. Moon sponsored event." I have
no doubt that every Asian pictured in the video of the event was
a Moonie. Certainly the group marriages performed were a Moonie
ritual. After having experienced Rev. Moon, I was shocked to see
Farrakhan associating with him. If anyone was the devil it was
Rev. Moon who has a world following of brainwashed people,
enslaved to his unification theology. Rev. Moon not only tells
them when they can marry but when they can have sex after
marriage.
I condemned Farrakhan in an
essay called Rev. Farrakhan Moon, although my objective was to
attack Moon more than Farrakhan. But after the article appeared
on line and in my book
In The Crazy House
Called America, Farrakhan sent me a message by way of
Akbar Muhammad, his international representative, someone I've
known since I met him and the minister in 1968 at Mosque #7 in
Harlem. Farrakhan told Akbar, "Tell Marvin I love him but he
raked me over the coals in his article about me. Tell him the
next time he wants to write something about me, please call me
first to get my side of the story."
Chapter XXX
A
few months after organizing the Melvin Black Forum on Human
Rights, my elder and mentor, John
Douimbia came to me with an idea he'd been carrying
around with him for over twenty years, the Black Men's
Conference which would become a secular organization of black
men to deal with our myriad issues absent religiosity and across
political and class lines, a healing project that would allow us
to take control of our community as men, with a women's
component but with men taking authority of all issues relating
to our survival and thrival. John had presented his plan to many
brothers in the Bay but many of them ran from it or stole from
it. He first suggested it to the brothers at Mosque #26 in San
Francisco but they were swimming in religiosity and weren't
evolved enough to think out of the box.
One might say John saw what his old friend from his hustling
days in Harlem saw once he departed the Nation of Islam, Malcolm
X, that we needed a spiritual organization, i.e., Muslim Mosque,
Inc., and a secular organization, the Organization of
Afro-American Unity. Sadly, Malcolm was cut down before either
of these organizations became functional. But John saw the need
as Malcolm did—of
course Malcolm had run into his old friend from Harlem when he
was released from prison and began organizing Mosques for the
NOI. He asked John to help
invigorate the San Francisco temple and John agreed to do so
when he returned from his job in the merchant marines. But John
yet dreamed of the secular project but got nowhere until he ran
into me and I told him let's go for it. So we began planning and
organizing the Black Men's Conference which eventually took
place, November, 1980, at the Oakland Auditorium, attended by a
thousand black men, including a session organized by women.
But during the planning and organizing, John gave me lessons in
man-hood training during the many one on one meetings we held to
discuss how to put the conference together and what were the
objectives. One objective was the Elders Council, the seat of
community power and conflict resolution, whether street or
domestic violence, police violence or whatever. Male/female
relations was a topic, but most importantly, male to male
relations: how do we respect each other as men? How do we train
the boys into manhood. What rituals do they need to signal their
maturation since we can no longer send them into the jungle for
initiation by confronting the lions and tigers. The tragedy is
that in the absence of this grouping of men, the gangs have
taken over. Even in his madness, Eldridge Cleaver used to say,
"Where the boy scouts end, the gangs begin." Imagine, murder is
the initiation rite for gang membership. Instead of hunting the
lion we hunt each other.
John taught me to always have a balance when promoting the
conference, a balance of male and female energy. He demanded
when I promoted the conference on the media to always have a
female with me to speak. Indeed, the women became the most
energetic promoters of the conference, mainly because she wanted
her man, father, and sons to evolve from the patriarchal
domination of females into a more balanced symbiosis.
As an example of male interpersonal relations and conflict
resolution, John wanted Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton to
reconcile with each other, despite all the pain and suffering,
all the blood and bones, these two brothers had subjected the
brotherhood and sisterhood coast to coast. He recognized them
both for the good they did in advancing black liberation, he
recognized their failings. But in the spirit of black unity and
especially in terms of black male unity, he wanted them to come
together. The response came from Huey's brother Melvin Newton,
who told us Huey said, "There was too much blood on the path
between him and Eldridge, that with respect to those comrades
who had lost loved ones in the internecine warfare, he could not
reconcile with Eldridge, even though on the personal level he
wanted to do so."
I
should add that Dr. Nathan Hare wanted the two brothers to come
together as well. Hare was one of the principle supporters of
the Black Men's Conference and he too felt it would have gone a
long way toward black unity if they had resolved their
differences. And example of what we wanted occurred when
Geronimo Pratt was released from prison after twenty seven
years: we understand that he forgave Ron
Karenga of the US organization that had violent and death
dealing encounters with the Panthers in
Los Angeles, including the
death of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins in the
BSU meeting room on the campus of
UCLA. We understand when Ron Karenga
came to prison for torturing black women he suspected of being
agents, Geronimo saved Karenga
from retaliation. He ordered the brothers not to kill
Karenga. This is the type of
spirit we wanted the Black Men's Conference to emulate, agape or
unconditional love and forgiveness.
But it didn't happen and opinion in the Bay was so negative
against Eldridge that we ultimately had to ask him to drop from
participation in the conference. I know this hurt him and it
hurt me to tell him he could not be a part of the brotherhood we
were organizing, but there was a consensus of opinion that he
was bad news. And this lack of ability to reconcile has
implications for the present strife and violence in our
communities coast to coast. We call ourselves conscious black
men and women, but we harbor petty hatreds long after it is time
to let them go. It it a sign of political and spiritual
immaturity that we must overcome.
We see white men and women in the Congress who hate each others
guts, yet they unite for the common good. This is what we wanted
to achieve with the Black Men's Conference. The concept was
taken up fifteen years later by Minister Farrakhan with the
Million Man March. Yet, just as the Black Men's Conference
failed to morph into a secular organization, the
MMM has apparently gone nowhere,
caught between religiosity and the secular dream, unable to
resolve the contradiction.
Chapter XXXI
After the Black Men's
Conference dropped Eldridge, I did not see him for a few months.
Meanwhile I was confronted with how to deal with the black men
who came to the post-conference meetings to become a part of the
organization. But we were not prepared to receive the men
because all our time had been spent organizing the conference.
John Douimbia tried to tell me to slow down but I was moving
full steam ahead, about to sink into the chasm of black male
political insanity.
Not having the
organizational structure in order was like inviting friends to
dinner but having no food. People were anxious and ready for
something to happen. They were pumped up from the conference and
jockeying for power in the potentially new organization. I was
confronted with three forces coming at me simultaneously: the
progressive black bourgeoisie, the black intellectuals, and the
grass roots. When I saw that John had used me to organize the
project for his comrades, the black bourgeoisie, I said no way
was I going to deliver this organization to the so-called
progressive black bourgeoisie who were basically sycophants for
the Democratic Party.
I fell back on my black
intellectual comrades but they failed me. When I called upon
them to take things to the next level, all they wanted to do was
meet around a conference table and sip coffee. I saw they were
not about to do much more than talk. After all, they informed me
they had families and jobs, thus no real time for the black
men's conference as an organization.
The third element was the
grass roots brothers who were sincere and energetic but simply
ignorant, so I could not see delivering the conference to them
either. I was thus in a dilemma of major proportions. I needed a
way to bring the forces into functional unity, maybe some
Machiavellian approach that would allow the unity of opposites.
Instead, when I saw John
was determined to make the conference a black bourgeoisie
organization, I simply dropped out and the ship of black men
eventually sank. Fifteen years later, Farrakhan picked up the
ball with the Million Man March, but clearly there is no
organization of the Million Black Men. Maybe our negrocities (Baraka's
term) are simply overwhelming, and except for the Obama Drama we
are into reverse evolution, dancing backwards like Michael
Jackson.
Chapter XXXII
After the Black Men's
Conference fizzled, I returned to the classroom, teaching
theatre at Oakland's Laney College. Odell Johnson, President of
the college, my homeboy from Fresno, hired me. But many of my
theatre students couldn't read the script. Nevertheless, I put
together a musical drama entitled In the Name of Love, a
poetic drama that Eldridge Cleaver showed up to see several
times. He loved it because he said it returned drama to the
Shakespearean tradition of poetic theatre.
There were quite a few
people who came to view it more than once. At first I couldn't
figure out why they were returning, but soon it hit me that
maybe the topic touched their lives as good drama should. My
major topic was polygamy or plural marriage. This explains why
Dr. Yusef Bey of Your Black Muslim Bakery came with his
entourage on several occasions. Betty King, known as the Mother
Theresa of Oakland, came more than once. I found out that Betty
had been in a relationship with a married man for several years
so she was trying to understand some things that were going on
in her life.
All during the production I
was having problems with the technical staff as well as the
theatre director, both of whom were Jews and had literally kept
blacks from using one of the best theatres in the Bay. The Jews
acted as if the theatre was their sacred turf and blacks should
keep out. Well, as per usual, I came in kicking and screaming
that their reign was over and we had every right to the space.
The tech man warned me I might not have lights during the
production, they might mysteriously cut off in the middle of a
scene. I replied that I might put his lights out as well. And
then one day he took items from my archives on display in the
lobby and put them in his office. When I saw him in the hall I
took a swing at his head but missed.
He called the dean of our
department, Melvin Newton, yes, Huey Newton's brother, who had
me arrested by campus police. I was later released and told to
not return for a few days, but I ignored Melvin's order and
returned a day or two later. He called the campus police again
but I told them to call the President who overrode Melvin's
order. If he ever did, Melvin has not liked me since. Actually,
Melvin didn't like anyone associated with his brother, since he
was nothing, certainly not the historic figure like his brother.
During this time revolutionary sister Dessie X Woods (Rashida
Muhammad, may she rest in peace—she
has a street named in her honor downtown Oakland) came on campus
to support me. She said of Melvin, "He and Huey didn't come from
the same womb. Melvin came from a baboon's asshole."
I also taught a class at
Merritt College called Manhood Training. I taught brother Rickey
Clay (Bakari of Uhuru House) one on one. He had performed the
role of Revolutionary Man in In the Name of Love at
Laney. After my class he actually joined the revolutionary Uhuru
House and has been there ever since. He is currently in charge
of the local Uhuru Movement.
During this time the
brothers from the Black Men's Conference wanted to support Dr.
Nathan Hare for superintendent of Oakland Public Schools. We
held a rally at Oakland High School, but when we discovered some
negative background issues about Dr. Hare, we withdrew his name.
But during that rally at Oakland High I met an English teacher
named Marsha Satterfield who had studied my writings while a
student at Southern University in Louisiana. She was highly
intelligent and a dedicated teacher and soon we were living
together. She became part of my polygamous family.. She put up
with my madness for quite some time, allowing me to subject her
and my other women to much stress and abuse, verbal and
physical. At a cast party, she and Hurriyah fought over whose
time it was to be with me. The fight started when Marsha called
Hurriyah a bitch, something Hurriyah didn't play, being a
Chicago woman.
As director and writer, I
took full advantage of the women, causing one dancer to tell me,
"I'm not givin you no pussy, Marvin, you got enough already!"
One day I got a call from
Dessie X to come rescue her from an abusive situation with a
Muslim minister in San Francisco. I let her stay at my house and
introduced her to Mustafa Abul Rahim, whose family had won the
million dollars. Mustafa proceeded to abuse her as well, even
though Dessie X had killed a white man in the South who tried
to rape her and won release from prison after the Uhuru
Movement came to her defense and spread propaganda about her
cause. So I had to take her from Mustafa and put her under my
care.
When I got a temporary
teaching job near Fresno, I took her with me until she started
seeing ghosts while I was at work. Eldridge told me to be
patient with her because she had only recently gotten out of
prison and was still traumatized. I took his advice but Dessie
made the mistake of calling my mother and telling her she was
one of my wives. Mom told her she didn't want to hear anything
about Marvin and his wives, please don't call her again.
I soon returned Dessie to
the Bay Area and dropped her off at the Black Muslim Bakery
where she hooked up with a brother and was married to him until
she made her transition (may she rest in peace).
I was soon joined in
Fresno by Eldridge Cleaver. This time he was not making dick
pants but dick pots. He designed stone planters with a giant
phallus at one end. When he brought People's magazine to my
house for a story about his planters, I told him it was time to
go and we parted again.
Chapter XXXIII
I hated to send Eldridge
packing but enough was enough. I was tired of his focus on the
phallus. I wanted to understand his fixation with this male
organ that had caused him so much trouble throughout his life.
What was the sexual psychology or pathology of this man? What
was going on in the deep structure of his mind that over powered
all other subjects and concerns. Obviously it was compulsive
obsessive behavior. But didn't I suffer a sexual addiction as
well, was not my polygamy merely the expression of a sexual
addiction gone wild? After all, no matter how much sex I had it
was never enough, I was never satisfied, and I am certain the
women were never satisfied either, certainly not psychologically
and probably not sexually since they are one —psycho-sexuality.
I came to realize that my
psycho-sexuality was nothing more than an expression of my
addictive personality, that no matter what I did it would become
an addiction, that I could never get enough, whether it was
alcohol, weed or other drugs. There was no social drinking in my
book, rather, my object was to drink to get drunk as possible,
the smoke weed until there was no more, and to do the same with
Crack which is called chasing the dragon that is forever eluding
one's grasp.
So maybe Cleaver suffered a
similar addictive personality, except that his was focused on
his sexuality, and of course he went to the extreme with rape,
actually a pathology that transcends sex into the realm of power
and domination, and according to what he told me, it was not
only to have power over the female but the male as well. He told
me the process of the rapist. First, he would stalk the motel,
lying in wait for a couple to check in and once they put the key
in the door and opened it, he would charge into them, blocking
the door with his foot. Then he would tie the man and woman and
proceed to rape the woman while the man watched. He said his joy
was not in having sex with the woman but in making the man watch
his woman transform from resistance to acceptance of his sexual
aggression.
Of course he told us in
Soul on Ice that he practiced on black women and perfected
with white women. And ultimately he served eighteen years in
prison for his psychopathic behavior. Should we conclude that he
was simply a sick puppy, yet thank him for whatever positive
contribution he made to the liberation struggle. After all, he
did not have to join the struggle, he could have been a very
successful writer, but he chose social activism rather than
commercial success, some might say to the detriment of many
people or to the movement in general. But would it have been the
same without Eldridge? Bobby Seale blames me for keeping
Eldridge from the Panthers, then he blames me for introducing
Eldridge to them. You can't have it both ways, Bobby!
But we can say the
liberation was inundated with social psychopaths, or as
Dr.
Cornell West likes to say, "Those maladjusted to injustice."
Yes, as in any liberation struggle, there are criminal
psychopaths, hustlers, opportunists, agent provocateurs,
snitches, uncle toms, along with the sincere, the honest, the
romantics, idealists and dreamers. Sometimes they are in one
personality, thus the complexity of some individuals and the
simplicity of others.
I remember the night we
were in Los Angeles during the Born Again days. We wanted to get
served by prostitutes, so we were in the motel area near Sunset
Strip. But as we were going into the motel with our ladies, we
saw a blind man being led up the stairs by a sex worker.
Eldridge acknowledged the sexual needs of the blind man and the
service the worker was performing, thus he lambasted those who
want to outlaw prostitution which has a social need as evidenced
by the blind man. Would society deny the blind man satisfaction?
Chapter XXXIV
And then along came
Crack.
It wasn't before long that it appeared that not only did the
masses succumb to Crack but the liberation movement as well,
including and especially its leaders. The same happened in the
Black Arts Movement as well. Can we not say the entire black
nation fell victim? Even black studies professors fell into the
crack of Crack, even presidents of colleges, such as John Green,
president of Merritt College in Oakland. The bourgeoisie was not
exempt, nor the grass roots. The most beautiful women from every
class of black society turned into Crack whores, toss ups or
strawberries. And in reality the men were Crack whores too, even
the children were literally sold to the dope man. Turned out
mothers told their dope dealing sons they need not trade dope
for sex with Crack hos, he could have sex with his mother so she
could get the dope instead of the Crack ho.
The ghetto turned into a
giant auction block. Men and women sold themselves to the
highest bidder for Crack. When a husband and wife ran out of
Crack, the husband would demand his wife give herself to the
dope man for a package. Sometimes the wife never returned.
Sometimes the husband would offer himself.
Yes, brothers who claimed
they weren't homosexual performed homosexual acts for Crack.
Women did the same for whomever had the package. Women who
weren't lesbian performed lesbian sexual acts for the dope man
or whomever had the package.
What caused such moral
degeneration and desperation in the black nation? We know there
are no mysteries, no mystery God. So let us turn to the US
Government, and we can pinpoint the Crack epidemic to Freeway
Rick and a Nicaraguan named Blandon, as documented in the
American Gangster Series on BET. But also thanks to journalist
Gary Webb who lost his career and ultimately lost his life
chronicling the Crack epidemic and the source of it, which he
uncovered was the US Government's use of Crack to buy weapons
for the Nicaraguan Contras in their fight against the
revolutionary Sandinista Government in Nicaragua.
The black nation was turned
into Crack hos to benefit the American Right Wing Revolution of
President Ronald Reagan, supposedly the greatest Present we ever
had, but Allah brought him down so low in his last days that
they wouldn't show you his picture. He was so deranged he
couldn't come to his own birthday party.. We are certain he
approached the madness of Shakespeare's King Lear for the
retribution he deserved for destroying the black nation with
Crack.
Does this excuse the
revolutionaries, the black bourgeoisie, or the grass roots for
falling victim to the white man's tricknology? No! We had
knowledge he was the devil,
Elijah told us this. And after
Elijah
Imam Khomeini told us America was the Great Satan, and
after Khomeini
President Chavez came to the United Nations
telling us he smelled the Devil, meaning President Bush, and
then the other day came
President Lula of Brazil telling the
president of France he and his blue eyed brothers and sisters
are responsible for the world's troubles because of their white
supremacy arrogance, thinking they are the world's most
intelligent people while we can see clearly with the global
financial meltdown that they lack the knowledge of the lowest
imbecile or mentally retarded person awaiting the little yellow
bus to stop outside his house to drive him to Special Ed.
I give former
President
Bush credit for one thing he did positive: he got mental illness
placed on par with physical illness with respect to insurance
and health care. And we pray he takes advantage of the mental
health component to check himself in to a mental health center
to recover from his addiction to white supremacy. Let us hope
other Americans, black and white, will do the same.. After all,
Attorney General Holder has told us the American people are
cowards with respect to their unabashed racism, despite the
election of Obama..
To the disgrace of our
ancestors, our elders, parents and children, we fell victim to
Crack, myself, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, David Hilliard,
and thousands of other radicals and revolutionaries. But we
know, according to the Bible, there were two women in the field,
God took one but left the other. Perhaps I am here to write this
narrative because God spared me to tell this story. Thank you
God!
posted 22 March 2009
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* * * *
Comments on "My Friend the Devil" by
Marvin X
One of America's great
storytellers. Maybe second only to Mark Twain. Of course, I'd
place Marvin X ahead of him even. More and more I am convinced
this work will be a best-seller. Though I have never read a
Cleaver biography, a lot of this material seems to be new and if
not factually new, it is from a novel perspective .—Rudolph
Lewis, editor, ChickenBones. A Journal,
www.nathanielturner.com
You are doing a tremendous service telling our history in our
own words. I am proud to be one of your students. — Ramal
Lamar (storyteller in training)
Wonderful appreciation of both Elijah and Clara. Rare perception
nowadays, what with the Malcolm cult. The pendulum is swinging .—John
Woodford, former Editor, Muhammad Speaks Editor, Michigan Today,
Univ. of Mich.
Hallelujah! MX is reminiscing, I must say, entertainingly, about
his historic dalliance w/ shaitan rat on... —Amiri
Baraka, Newark, NJ
Great stuff, man, priceless ….—Rudi
Mwongozi, Pianist, Oakland CA
Thank you Marvin...get it all out...write it out...sweat it
out...dance it out...cry it out, swear it out, walk it
out...work it out....thank you for sharing ...respect .—Joan
Tarika Lewis, Violinist, Oakland First female member of the
Black Panther Party
Enjoyed your post about Cleaver. Very interesting. Contained
vivid imagery .—Martin
Reynolds, Editor, Oakland Tribune
If my memory is correct, the Black Panthers were at the Black House, San
Francisco, when the first issue of the Black Panther Newspaper hit the
press. Eldridge Cleaver and I had founded the Black House as a
political/cultural center on Broderick Street, 1967, and after I
introduced him to Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, co-founders of the BPP
and he became Minister of Information. The Black House morphed into the
San Francisco Headquarters of the BPP.
Ethna X. Wyatt, aka Hurriyah Asar, Marvin X's
partner and co-founder of Black Arts West Theatre
and Black House Political/Cultural Center,
San Francisco, 1966-67.
The Black House as a cultural
center collapsed from ideological differences so the artists eased on
down the road, including playwright Ed Bullins, Ethna Wyatt and myself.
Ed Bullins fled to New York as did many artists, especially musicians,
whom I discovered, especially when I hit Harlem myself, were more
politically astute than the so called politicos, especially the Panthers
who did not recover from their anti-art or war against "cultural
nationalists" stance until they attended the Pan African Cultural
Festival in Algeria.
 ;
Eldridge Cleaver and Marvin X
This pic is cerca 1978
photo Muhammad Al Kareem
But before I departed Black House, I saw the BPP newspaper being laid
out in Cleaver's room adjacent to mine. The BPP trip to Sacramento was
planned at Black House. I could hear their planning session from my
bedroom that Mrs. Amina Baraka described as Spartan compared to
Eldridge's that was "high tech", i.e., he had a speaker phone!
Amina and Amiri Baraka. Amina is holding son Ras, now Mayor of
Newark, NJ
She was
pregnant with the Baraka's first child, Obalaji, while at the Black
House that was visited by such artists and politicos as Sonia Sanchez,
Askia Toure, Sarah Webster Fabio, Avotcja, Emory Douglas, Samuel Napier,
Judy Juanita, Chicago Art Ensemble, Reginald Lockett, Ellendar Barnes,
George Murray, including
Alprentice Bunchy Carter, Cleaver's close associate from Soledad
Prison. 
Cleaver and Bunchy Carter
Alprentice Bunchy Carter
Carter was one of most handsome Black men in the BLM, a former leader of
the seven thousand member Los Angeles Slauson Street gang, poet and
Cleaver's co-chair of the Soledad Prison
Black Culture Club that was the beginning of the American Prison Movement.
The Black Dialogue Magazine brothers who visited the Soledad Prison
Black Culture Club, chaired by Eldridge Cleaver and Bunchy Carter, 1966.
Left to Right: Aubrey LaBrie, Marvin X, Abdul Sabrey, Al Young, Arthur
Sheridan (founding editor of Black Dialogue) and Duke Williams. Most
ofus were students at San Francisco State College/University when we
visited Soledad Prison. There was thus a unity in the Black Liberation
Movement
between students, prison inmates, Black intellectuals, artists and
activists. There can be no revolution until all sectors of the community
unite and become one fist, i.e., youth, students, workers,
intellectuals, artists, women, progressive bourgeoisie and the spiritual
leaders. The staff of Black Dialogue Magazine visited the club at
Cleaver's invitation that we received from his lawyer/lover Attorney
Beverley Axelrod, to whom he dedicated Soul on Ice and promised to marry
upon his release. She smuggled his manuscript out of Soledad in her
legal papers. She won a percentage of royalties by default after Cleaver
went into exile from America. Of course he met Kathleen Neal and
Beverly was out of the picture.
Ironically, a few days before I performed his memorial service in
Oakland, her Pacifica house slid down the hill in a mudslide. I didn't
know she was at the memorial until years later when I
viewed the video of the memorial. Kathleen and daughter Joju attended the memorial. Kathleen
to Marvin, "This was a nice memorial Marvin, but there were just too many Muslims." Alas,
their son is a Sunni Muslim, Ahmad Eldridge Cleaver.
Kathleen and Eldridge holding
son Ahmad Eldridge Cleaver
Bunchy was killed in the BSU meeting room on the campus of UCLA, along
with BPP member John Huggins, supposedly by members of Ron Karenga's US
organization, although Geronimo Pratt
absolves US of this twin murder. For sure, it was a Cointelpro affair,
have no doubt about this. See Senator Church's hearings on Cointelpro
and the Black Movement, including the Civil Rights Movement.
Comrade John Huggins 
Black Panthers inside the Sacramento Capitol building
The climax in my relationship with Cleaver and the Panthers occurred
when I got into a confrontation with Lil' Bobby Hutton over the youth
club in the basement. True, the youth were out of control and Hutton
told me,"The Supreme Commander, i.e. Huey Newton, said close it down
because it could be an excuse for the pigs to raid Black House." Of
course Lil' Bobby and the BPP were correct, I was being emotional. We
had received information from some progressive Black bourgeoisie sisters
that the Black House was indeed going to be raided as they had
information the police knew the youth were taking liberties with women
or young girls, playing hookie from school and partying in the basement.
Years later though, I met those youth who were grown and quite
conscious culturally, and they thanked me for their Black House
experience.
I identified with the youth and was their mentor, so I told Hutton,
"Fuck the Supreme Commander! I'm not closing down shit!" I could see in
his eyes, Hutton wanted to get me that instant but restrained himself,
saying, "We'll deal with you later, dude!" That night all I heard was
the click of 45 automatics outside my door. I wasn't intimidated and
didn't give a fuck. I knew I was just as crazy as Huey, Bobby and
Eldridge, but shortly after the incident, Eldridge evicted Ed Bullins,
Ethna and myself. Ethna and I joined the Nation of Islam. After dropping
out of San Francisco State College/now University, I was drafted but
under Panther and Nation of Islam influence, I fled to Toronto, Canada,
later Mexico City and Belize, from which I was deported and spent five
months in jail and Federal prison at Terminal Island. The Panthers said,
"We must not only resist the draft but resist arrest as well! Actually,
no matter where I was, whether in exile or prison, the task was the
same, i.e., to teach the deaf, dumb and blind the reality of our
condition. So I did so in Toronto, Mexico City and Belize, Central
America. And for doing so, one can be killed, exiled or jailed.
Somehow God saved me to tell this story. Years later, San Francisco
County Jail Sheriff Charles Smith (who threw Muhammad Speaks newspaper
in my cell during the three months I spent in jail at 350 Bryant Street)
told me he attended a Interpol Conference in Belize at which they
discussed my presence in Central America.
The killing of Denzil Dowell in Richmond was the first case of pigs
killing North American Africans the BPP tackled. Fifty years later,
where are we and the police? It seems another Denzil Dowell is murdered
by the pigs every day coast to coast. Fifty years ago the Panthers took
up arms to defend the community. Before them were brothers in the South
such as the Deacons for Defense and Robert Williams in North Carolina
(Negroes With Guns).
Since the BPP took up arms, many pigs were killed and many many Black
Panther Party members were murdered by the pigs.
Cleaver's passport during his exile
During his exile, Cleaver met the North Vietnamese General
Giap who defeated America in the Vietnam war.
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