Dr. M's Revolution on the Rocks Book Tour 2012

In this 2010 video clip, Marvin X performs at the African American Museum/Library in Oakland CA. Poet Phavia Kujichagulia reads Parable of the Green Revolution,  from the first edition of The Wisdom of Plato Negro, parables/fables by Marvin X. Dr. M reads Enough, Enough, Enough, from his poetry collection In the Land of My Daughters, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2002, accompanied by Rashidah Sabreen, vocals and guitar, performing her original song I'm Ready for a New Love. Video by Ken Johnson

Dr. M/Marvin X is currently on the east coast promoting the second edition of The Wisdom of Plato Negro, parables/fables, Black Bird Press, 2012.


November 2012

1          Thursday, 6-8pm, Sankofa Books, 2714 Georgia Avenue, NW, Wash DC
2-4       Black Power to Hip Hop Conference, Howard University, Wash DC
4          Sunday, 7pm, Umoja House, 2015 Bunker Hill Rd., NE, Wash DC
9          Friday, 7pm, Moonstone Art Center, 110 South 13th Street, Philadelphia PA
16        Friday, 3pm, Black and Nobel Books, 1411 West Erie Ave., Philadelphia
TBA    Dr. Joyce Joyce/Sonia Sanchez hosts Dr. M, Temple University, Philly

TBA    New York schedule

For information and/or booking, contact: Sun in Leo PR, 718-496-2305
prgirl@ suninleo.com

Tour sponsored by Black Bird Press, Sun in Leo Public Relations, Academy of da Corner, Oakland Post Newspaper Group
www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com

Black Arts West Founding Father  Dr. M/aka Marvin X  East Coast Book Tour Friend on Facebook Follow on Twitter Forward to a Friend About Marvin X:http://blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com Marvin X’s has been a published writer for over 40 years and has a storied past as a writer, teacher, community activist, journalist, entrepreneur, husband, father, and recovered addict.  He has befriended, offended and crossed paths with the likes of Huey Newton, president Ronald Reagan, Amiri Baraka, the Republicans, the Democrats, Donald Rumsfeld, Eldridge Cleaver, and Jim & Tammy Faye Baker just to name a few! He chronicles the Black experience, the American experience in language that is raw, gritty and brutally honest.  Highly informed, Marvin X speaks to many societal levels and to both genders—to the intellectual as well as to the man/woman on the street or the unfortunate in prison—to the mind as well as the heart. He shuns political correctness for the truth of life and common sense dominates his thought.  Marvin X’ work in advocating racial cohesion and religious dedication as an antidote to the legacy of racism he saw around him in the 1960s and 1970s has made him an important voice of his generation. He has lectured at California College of the Arts and taught at Fresno State University; San Francisco State University; UC-Berkeley and San Diego; University of Nevada, Reno; Mills College, Laney and Merritt Colleges in Oakland. Dr. M/Marvin X,  teacher, community activist, published author for over 40 years, and one of the founding fathers of the Black Arts Movement, hits the east coast to celebrate the release of his latest title, The Wisdom of Plato Negro. The Wisdom of Plato Negro, parables/fables is a post-modern version of the ancient tradition of story telling. Says Rudolph Lewis, "Marvin X has expanded contemporary literature. I suspect there is nothing like them in post-modern American literature." Ishmael Reed declares, "...If I had to pin down the influence upon Marvin X...I would cite the Yoruba texts: texts in the Yoruba language reveal that didacticism is a key component of the Yoruba story telling style.... Marvin X imparts wisdom by employing cautionary tales and uses his own life and mistakes to consul the young to avoid mistakes." His recent stop in Houston included appearances at SHAPE Community Center, Khepera Books, University of Houston, Africana Studies Department, and Texas Southern University School of Business. The tour will continue with dates in Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, Washington DC at the Black Power Hip Hop Conference, November 2-4. Marvin X is available for lectures, speaking engagements, and book signings. For Booking, contact: Sun in Leo PR | 718 496 2305 | prgirl@suninleo.com Marvin X and mentor, the incomparable Sun Ra The Wisdom of Plato Negro, cover of latest release

The Murder of Malcolm X - What Really Happened?

Malcolm X's Daughter Exposes Farrakhan (extended clip)

Are You Standing With Your Prez?

Marvin, I wanted to share this special news with you: In the last 48 hours, over 64,000 individuals donated to our campaign to win a Democratic majority for President Obama. And since the debate alone, we raised over $1.1 million in grassroots support online. But, most special of all, late Tuesday night we reached ONE MILLION supporters to this campaign! Simply put, we are grateful for everything you do, and we’re astounded by how you continue to raise the bar. We have 19 days left to win this election. President Obama is out there on the campaign trail and the debate stage fighting for everything we believe in. Let’s give him an extra energy boost down the stretch. Click here to congratulate President Obama on winning the debate and let him know you’re standing with him. This campaign is built by one million strong for a Democratic majority. I can’t say it enough, thank you. Nancy

Penn Center Tour, Gullahland SC

Amiri Baraka on Newark Rebellion, 1967

Newark Journal

A Poet Looks Back on a Bloody Week in 1967

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

At a poetry festival in Newark on Saturday, the poet Amiri Baraka will discuss the impact that the riots in the city had on his work.

By JAMES BARRON

October 10, 2012

NEWARK — The man in the tan shirt led the way to a squarish room in his house and sat down at a round table. Quietly, matter-of-factly, he talked about what happened in the summer of 1967.

"Rebellion, I call it," said the man, the poet Amiri Baraka, as he recalled the riots in Newark, which lasted nearly a week and left 26 people dead and more than 1,000 injured, among them Mr. Baraka himself.

Four and a half decades have passed, enough time for historians and urban policy experts to write millions of words about Newark's industrial decline after World War II and the riots that became a symbol of urban unrest and that continue to cast a shadow over the city.

Mr. Baraka, who became a celebrity in the decades after the riots, is one of the featured names at a four-day poetry festival in Newark starting on Thursday that organizers claim is the largest such festival in North America. The discussion in his house the other day offered a preview, and an almost moment-by-moment look back at the bloody upheaval. In the end, 889 stores had been damaged or looted, officials said.

By the time the violence broke out in Newark, there had been race riots in Jersey City, Harlem and the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. And Mr. Baraka, a writer once known as LeRoi Jones who had been a playwright in Greenwich Village and a black nationalist in Harlem, had returned to his native Newark. "The idea that the city would blow up was obvious," he said.

It began after the police stopped a black cabdriver for a traffic violation and took him to a police station, where the arresting officers beat him. Mr. Baraka said he had joined a crowd outside the police station during the day but had walked home as night fell. Rumors were rampant that the taxi driver had died in police custody; in fact, he had been taken to a hospital.

Before long, Mr. Baraka said, word spread that bricks and bottles were being thrown at the police station and that crowds were breaking windows in the neighborhood. "I had this brand-new Volkswagen bus," he said, and he and several friends piled in. "We drove up Springfield Avenue. By the time we got to Belmont, it was raging."

"Pretty soon, pop, pop, pop, pop," he said. "Shots."

He said that the police stopped the van. One of the officers was "a cop I had gone to high school with — Italian."

"He hit me on the top of my head with his gun," he said, "and then they started beating." He said people watching from an apartment building took aim at the officers and threw things — including, he said, a refrigerator.

"The police took me to Dominick Spina's office," he said, referring to the Newark police director at the time. "I fell on the floor. Spina says, 'We got you,' like some grade-B movie. I say, 'Yes, but I'm not dead yet.' That's the level things were at."

He was arrested on charges of carrying an illegal weapon and resisting arrest, and even before the trial began, he castigated the judge who was presiding and the all-white panel of potential jurors as "my oppressors." He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, but in 1969 a judge reversed the conviction for lack of evidence.

Mr. Baraka has been a regular at the poetry festival, which has been held every other year since 1986 and is formally called the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Mr. Baraka is scheduled to read poems at the festival; he is also scheduled to appear on Saturday with Clement A. Price, a history professor at Rutgers University, in a discussion of the effect of the riots and other 1960s turbulence on Mr. Baraka's work.

It was an appearance at the Dodge festival in 2002 that cost Mr. Baraka his position as New Jersey's poet laureate. He read from his post-Sept. 11 poem "Someone Blew Up America," in which he suggested that Israel had known about the Sept. 11 attacks in advance and that it had warned 4,000 Israeli citizens not to go to work at the World Trade Center that day. Within days, Gov. James E. McGreevey demanded that he resign as poet laureate. He refused, but the State Legislature eventually abolished the position.

"Poetry is underrated," he said, "so when they got rid of the poet laureate thing, I wrote a letter saying, 'This is progress. In the old days, they could lock me up. Now they just take away my title.' "

But the conversation soon returned to Newark, then and now.

"Newark, pre-1967, is a different place," he said. "That 1967 thing was like a reckoning. I used to get held by the police for going to a poetry reading. The police would take the script out of my hand. That's like living under some kind of fascism."

"This is another era," he said. "My son is a councilman in the South Ward. In a sense that's what we always wanted, that he'd go away to school and not disappear into the suburbs with some degree. His brother is his chief of staff. His other brother is his chief of security." 

No Winner for African Leadership Prize

Mo Ibrahim prize for African leadership: No winner

Mo Ibrahim said only exceptional leaders will get the prize

Continue reading the main story

There is no winner this year for the world's most valuable individual prize - the Mo Ibrahim prize for good governance in Africa.

The $5m (£3.2m) prize is supposed to be awarded each year to a democratically elected leader who governed well, raised living standards and then voluntarily left office.

The panel said no candidate had met all of the criteria - as in 2009 and 2010.

Last year, Cape Verde President Pedro Verona Pires won the prize.

He led the fight against Portuguese colonialism, introduced multi-party politics and was praised raising for living standards.

The $5m prize is spread over 10 years and is followed by $200,000 a year for life.

'No compromise'

Announcing the decision, Mr Ibrahim said: "You make your bed, you have to lie on it. If we said we're going to have a prize for exceptional leadership, we have to stick to that. We are not going to compromise."

"We are not just in the business of positive messages - we would lose our credibility," the AFP news agency quotes him as saying.

"The prize committee reviewed a number of candidates but none met all of the criteria needed to win the prize," said committee member Salim Ahmed Salim.

The two other winners in the six years since the prize was launched were Botswana's President Festus Mogae and Mozambique's Joaquim Chissano.

Earlier this month, Mr Ibrahim's foundation announced a special $1m award to Archbishop Desmond Tutu for "speaking truth to power".

The London-based body called the cleric "one of Africa's great voices for justice, freedom, democracy and responsible, responsive government".

Sudan-born telecoms entrepreneur Mr Ibrahim says the good governance prize is needed because many leaders of sub-Saharan African countries come from poor backgrounds and are tempted to hang on to power for fear that poverty awaits them when they leave office.

New Book Criticizes Malcolm X Biography

NYMETRO

A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X - New Book Critcizes Malcolm X Biography‏

• Posted by TheBlackList on October 15, 2012 at 9:30am
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BLACK CLASSIC PRESS RELEASES SEARING COLLECTION CRITICIZING PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING BOOK ON MALCOLM X ~

My question is what have you done lately to advance the legacy of Malcolm X and the revolutionary nationalism he represented?

--Marvin X

  ~ Black Classic Press (BCP) announced today the release of A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X. The new collection of essays is a critical response to Manning Marable's biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which was controversially acclaimed as the late scholar's "magnum opus" and awarded a Pulitzer Prize this past spring. Though lauded by many, Marable's book was also debated and denounced by others as a flawed biography full of conjecture and errors and lacking in new factual content. In BCP's A Lie of Reinvention, editors Jared A. Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs lead a group of established and emerging Black scholars and activists who have taken a clear stance that A Life of Reinvention is a political reshaping - a contradiction and a distortion of the life and times of Malcolm X.

Included among the essays assembled in this book are the works of many who have benefited from Malcolm X's example and legacy. Among these is A. Peter Bailey, a veteran journalist who worked with Malcolm's Organization of Afro-American Unity, and who takes issue with multiple aspects of Marable's book, including how he himself is characterized within it. Bill Strickland, who also knew Malcolm, provides what he calls a "personal critique" of the biography. From behind prison walls, Mumia Abu-Jamal offers a revision to his earlier public praise of Marable's book and a far more critical reflection on it. Rising scholars Kali Akuno, Kamau Franklin, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Christopher M. Tinson, Eugene Puryear, and Greg Thomas join the sage, activist voices of Rosemari Mealy, Patricia Reid-Merritt, Raymond Winbush, Amiri Baraka, Karl Evanzz, William Sales, and Zak Kondo in pointing out numerous historical problems with and ideological misinterpretations in Marable's work.

As Burroughs writes in the work's Coda: "[Marable] does not need our tribute; others will take care of that. History is more important than any biographer or biographical subject's legacy, including El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X). The issue for us is the need to preserve accurate historical memory, and to do so in concrete words and strong deeds."

About Black Classic Press
Black Classic Press was founded in 1978 by W. Paul Coates and specializes in publishing vintage and contemporary popular and academic works by and about people of African descent. The PRESS currently has more than 100 titles in print. Among the PRESS's notable authors are Walter Mosley, Amiri Baraka, Walter Rodney, and E. Ethelbert Miller as well as Dorothy Porter, John Henrik Clarke, George L. Jackson, and Bobby Seale. BCP titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West and are available from leading bookstores and directly from the PRESS. Visit www.blackclassicbooks.com for more information.

Purchase your copy of:
A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X

Corn for Cars= No food for People

RSS

US corn ethanol fuels food crisis in developing countries

The US ethanol programme pushed up corn prices by up to 21 per cent as it expanded to consume 40 per cent of the harvest Last Modified: 10 Oct 2012 14:18 inShare3 Email Print Share Feedback

The United States is by far the largest producer and exporter of corn in the world [EPA]

Record drought in the US farm belt this summer withered corn fields and parched hopes for a record US corn harvest, but US farmers may not be the ones most severely affected by the disaster. Most have insurance against crop failure. Not so the world's import-dependent developing countries, nor their poorest consumers. They are hurting. This is the third food price spike in the last five years, and this time the finger is being pointed squarely at biofuels. More specifically, the loss of a quarter or more of the projected US corn harvest has prompted urgent calls for reform in that country's corn ethanol programme. Domestically, livestock producers dependent on corn for feed have led demands for change in the US Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which mandates that a rising volume of fuel come from renewable sources. Up to now that has been overwhelmingly corn-based ethanol. In November, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will rule on a request for a waiver of the RFS mandate to reduce pressures on US corn supplies. But US livestock producers aren't the only ones affected by shortages and high prices. The most devastating impact is on the poor in developing countries, who often use more than half their incomes to buy food. It also hurts low-income developing countries dependent on corn imports. As I showed in my recent study, "The Costs to Developing Countries of US Ethanol Expansion", the US ethanol programme pushed up corn prices by up to 21 per cent as it expanded to consume 40 per cent of the US harvest. This price premium was passed on to corn importers, adding an estimated $11.6bn to the import bills of the world's corn-importing countries since 2005. More than half of that - $6.6bn - was paid by developing countries between 2005 and 2010. The highest cost was borne by the biggest corn importers. Mexico paid $1.1bnmore for its corn, Egypt $727m. Besides Egypt, North African countries saw particularly high ethanol-related losses: Algeria ($329m), Morocco ($236m), Tunisia ($99m) and Libya ($68m). Impacts were also high in other strife-torn countries in the region - Syria ($242m), Iran ($492m) and Yemen ($58m). North Africa impacts totalled $1.4bn. Scaled to population size, these economic losses were at least as severe as those seen in Mexico. The link between high food prices and unrest in the region is by now well documented, and US ethanol is contributing to that instability. Biofuel impacts on food prices The debate over biofuels has grown urgent since food prices first spiked in 2007-2008, ushering in a food crisis characterised by repeated jumps in global food prices. Prices for most staple foods doubled, fell when the bubble burst in 2009, then jumped again to their previous high levels in 2010-2011. After a brief respite in the first half of this year, the US drought triggered a new wave of price spikes, the third in just five years. Corn prices were particularly hard-hit, reaching record levels of more than $8.00/bushel, and more than $300 per metric tonne. Before the first spikes, prices had languished around $100/metric tonne. Experts have debated how much of the price increases should be blamed on global biofuels expansion. Few argue now that the contribution is small. A US National Academy of Sciences review attributed 20-40 per cent of the 2007-2008 price spikes to global biofuels expansion. Subsequent studies have confirmed this range for the later price increases. Why is the impact so large? Because so much food and feed is now diverted to produce fuel, and so much land is now used for biofuels feedstocks - corn and sugar for ethanol, soybeans, palm oil and a variety of other plants for biodiesel. This rapidly growing market was fuelled by a wide range of government incentives and mandates and by the rising price of petroleum. "That 40 per cent of the US corn crop being put into US cars represents an astonishing 15 per cent of global corn production." Nowhere is the impact clearer than in the diversion of US corn into ethanol production. Ethanol now consumes roughly 40 per cent of the US corn crop, up from just 5 per cent a decade ago. The biggest jump came after the US Congress enacted the RFS in 2005 then expanded it dramatically in 2007. A blending allowance of 10 per cent for domestic gasoline added to the demand, a level now potentially being raised to 15 per cent. These mandates for rising corn ethanol production combined with tax incentives to gasoline blenders and tariff protection against cheaper imports to create today's massive ethanol demand for corn. As corn prices rose farmers increased production, but not enough to accommodate the increased ethanol demand. So prices just kept rising and corn stocks just kept getting thinner and thinner. They were at dangerously low levels - about 15 per cent of global use - when the first price spikes happened in 2007-2008. They are at 14 per cent now. Impact on developing countries Corn is probably the most problematic feedstock for biofuels. In many parts of the world it is grown as food for human consumption, serving as the staple grain for some one billion people worldwide. It is also a key feed for livestock, giving it another direct link to the human food supply through meat, dairy and egg prices. US corn ethanol is particularly disruptive to international markets. The United States is by far the largest producer and exporter of corn in the world. That 40 per cent of the US corn crop being put into US cars represents an astonishing 15 per cent of global corn production. The diversion of so much corn from food and feed markets has produced a "demand shock" in international markets since 2004. For our study of the impacts on corn importers, we relied on estimates of how much lower corn prices would have been if ethanol production had not grown past its 2004 levels. The impacts rose with ethanol demand, reaching an estimated 21 per cent in 2009. We took those annual estimates and calculated the added cost each year, 2005-10, to the world's net corn-importing countries based on their net import volumes. The largest importer by far is Japan and the ethanol premium cost Japan an estimated $2.2bn. But our interest was developing countries because of their vulnerability to food price increases. Over the last 50 years, and particularly since the 1980s, the world's least developed countries have gone from being small net exporters of agricultural goods to huge net importers. The shift came when structural reforms in the 1980s forced indebted developing country governments to open their economies to agricultural imports while reducing their support for domestic farmers. The result: a flood of cheap and often-subsidised imports from rich countries, forcing local farmers out of business and off the land.  Drought to reduce US corn crop yield In the price spike of 2008, the world's least developed countries imported $26.6bn in agricultural goods and exported only $9.1bn, leaving an agricultural trade deficit for these overwhelmingly agricultural countries of $17.5bn, more than three times the deficit recorded in 2000 ($4.9bn). This squeezes government budgets, strains limited foreign exchange reserves and leaves the poor more exposed to food price increases. Guatemala, for example, saw its import dependence in corn grow from 9 per cent in the early 1990s to around 40 per cent today. This in a corn-producing country, the birthplace of domesticated corn. According to our estimates, Guatemala saw $91bn in ethanol-related impacts, $28m in 2010 alone. How big an impact is that? It represents six times the level of US agricultural aid that year and nearly as much as US food aid to Guatemala. It is equivalent to over 10 per cent of the government's annual expenditure on agricultural development. It is devastating for a country in which nearly half of children under five are malnourished. Of course, poor consumers are the ones most hurt by ethanol-related price increases, especially those in urban areas. Even in a net corn exporting country like Uganda, domestic corn prices spiked as international prices transmitted to local markets. Ugandans spend on average 65 per cent of their cash income on food, with poor urban consumers getting 20 per cent of their calories from corn purchased in the marketplace. More than half of Ugandans were considered "food insecure" in 2007, and the price spikes have only made that worse. US ethanol expansion has accounted for 21 per cent of corn prices in recent years, so it has forced thousands of Ugandans deeper into poverty and hunger. Stop fuelling the food crisis The US and other Northern governments can stop fuelling the food crisis with reckless biofuels expansion. The US can waive the RFS mandates to allow tight markets to adjust in a year of drought. It can join the European Union in reconsidering its mandates. It can halt the increase in blending targets to 15 per cent. On World Food Day, October 16, the FAO will convene an emergency meeting on the food crisis in Rome. Disgracefully, the G-20 group of economically powerful nations declined to convene its own emergency meeting, with a US spokesperson saying that "agricultural commodity markets are functioning". Global leaders should take a strong stand in Rome against biofuels expansion, endorse the use of food reserves to cushion markets in times of drought, demand rules to end financial speculation on food commodities and restrict the land grabs that are driven largely by global demand for biofuels. It's time we put food before fuel and people before cars. Timothy A Wise is the Policy Research Director, Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University, Medford. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.