Thursday, April 23, 2015

The Viet Cong Never Called Me a Nigguh!


Muhammad Ali

 


"I Ain't Got No Quarrel With The VietCong...
No VietCong Ever Called Me Nigger" — Muhammad Ali, 1966

On August 23, 1966, Muhammad Ali embarked on the biggest "fight" of his life when he applied with the Selective Service for conscientious objector status on religious grounds (as a minister with the Nation of Islam). In what became an extensive legal, political, professional, and personal battle, Ali was convicted of draft evasion, stripped of his boxing title, and became a lightning rod — and a voice — for opinions on the Vietnam War. Muhammad Ali's willingness to speak out against racism in the United States, and the affect it had on domestic and foreign policy, earned him many supporters and detractors. In 1971, nearly five years after it began, Ali's legal battle finally culminated with a unanimous decision (8-0 with Thurgood Marshall abstaining) by the United States Supreme Court overturning his draft conviction. The following resources document his struggle, his views, and his influence.

Clay, aka Ali v. United States 1966-1971
Click here for resources detailing Muhammad Ali's fight against induction into the U.S. Army — from 1966 to 1971. It includes the full text of the Supreme Court decision (Clay, aka Ali v. United States), a 1967 CIA document describing a pro Ali rally, editorials and coverage from the Nation of Islam publication, Muhammad Speaks, and more.

Ali's Vietnam Legacy
Muhammad Ali's stance on Vietnam inspired admiration and hatred among many. Click here to find resources describing Ali's Vietnam legacy, including reactions to his being named "Athlete of the Century" by USA Today in late 1999, an Ali interview with National Public Radio from December 2001, in which Ali answers his critics, and more.

 

Source: Muhammad Ali — The Measure of a Man. (Spring 1967). Freedomways, 7(2), 101-102.
"No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end."
—Muhammad Ali

Source: "Muhammad Ali — The Measure of a Man." (Spring 1967). Freedomways, 7(2), 101-102.
 
Send feedback or questions to kief@aavw.org Freedom Archives banner
“You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.”
― Hồ Chí Minh



Hồ Chí Minh 


Anti-War Demonstrators



Bay Area Asian Coalition Against the War

Link to Interactive 
Viet Nam War Timeline

Various Viet Nam sound clips
- Ho Chi Minh addressing the anti-war movement in English
Ho Chi Minh led the anti-colonial struggles against the French and the US. He was the first President of modern Viet Nam, declaring independence on September 2, 1945.
- Madame Nguyen Thi Bình appeals to the US Congress
Madame Binh served as Foreign Minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government and negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference. She has also been Vice-President, Minister of Education, and held other posts as one of the leaders of Viet Nam. (1972)
- Vietnamese Students
Protest demonstration by Vietnamese students, including US representative of the National Student Union of South Viet Nam, protesting repression in the southern part of Viet Nam under the Thieu regime. (1972)
- Dao Interview
One of the members of the Union of Vietnamese in the US, who were very active in the antiwar movement. (1976)
- Robert and Mabel Williams on Viet Nam
Leaders of an armed self-defense movement against the Klan in North Carolina, the Williams were forced into exile, first in Cuba, then in China.  For more on their story and struggle, see here.
- H Rap Brown - selections from a speech in 1967.
H Rap Brown (now Imam Jamil Al Amin) was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s.
- Huey Newton on the Black Panther Party and Viet Nam
Huey Newton was a founder and first Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party. (1970)
- Martin Luther King, Jr
Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam. (1967)

- Geronimo ji Jaga on Viet Nam and Detroit
A leading member of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, Geronimo was a Viet Nam war veteran. He was falsely imprisoned for 27 years in a frame-up engineered by the FBI as part of their counter-intelligence (Cointelpro) program. For more, see here.
- Chican@ Moratorium Speech on Viet Nam War
The Chicano Moratorium was a broad-based coalition of antiwar Chican@ groups throughout the Southwest that organized a march of more than 30,000 in Los Angeles on August 29, 1970, in which four were killed by police. Rosalio Munoz speaks.
- Chican@ Moratorium Press Conference on Viet Nam War
- Native Americans on Viet Nam
A solidarity statement that emphasizes anti-imperialist commonalities between the Vietnamese and Native American struggles. John McClain speaks for the Bay Area chapter of AIM. (1975)
- Attack the Water - Janice Mirikitani
A San Francisco poet who often read at antiwar events, and brought forth her childhood experience in the concentration camps in the US during World War II that imprisoned Japanese-Americans. (1973)

The Long Haired Warriors from mel halbach on Vimeo. They were soldiers, activists and tortured as prisoners of war. This is a film trailer about Vietnamese women who struggled against American occupation and the South Vietnamese government during the war in Vietnam.

Viet Nam Victory - April 30, 1975



Liberation Forces Tank entering Saigon - From BBC "War of the Flea"
Victory from Freedom Archives on Vimeo.
April 30, 2015 marks the 40th anniversary of the victory of the people of Viet Nam over the US military. The Vietnamese national liberation struggle moved the entire world and is one of the most important historical events of the 20th century.
The people’s war waged by the people of Viet Nam, reaching a peak in the Tet Offensive of 1968, demonstrated that a united people, even in a poor and underdeveloped nation, could defeat the most powerful military and economic power on earth.
In an era when national liberation struggles surged in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the struggle of the Vietnamese people provided an inspiring example to solidarity movements around the world and inside the US. The movement against the war in Viet Nam in the US was inextricably tied to the early anti-imperialism of the civil rights/Black liberation movement, and many other movements of the 1960s and 1970s. 
The victory of Viet Nam is a living example that holds lessons for the ongoing struggle against US imperialism today.  We are creating this online tribute, much of it drawn from the Freedom Archives, to help illustrate and pass on these lessons.
From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country-and failed. When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.
- Howard Zinn from A People's History of the United States


The Chican@ Moratorium marches against the Vietnam War played a decisive role in ending that conflict (poster: Malaquias Montoya)

Colonialists, International Traitors, Think Carefully Before You Take Vietnam - To Lien (1978)

Women played a powerful, absolutely crucial role in Viet Nam’s liberation struggle, from the Trung Sisters leading ancient struggles against Chinese domination to the courageous participation of millions of women from north and south in the people’s war against the US Empire. Prominent leaders include General Nguyen Thi Dinh, a commander of the National Liberation Front, and Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, who led the delegation for the Front at the Paris negotiations. There were a number of meetings between Vietnamese women with women from North America and other nations during the war; the example of women in Viet Nam’s independence struggle had a profound impact on the antiwar and then resurging women’s liberation movements—and in fact inspired women all over the world. In her book, Women and Revolution in Viet Nam, Arlene Eisen quotes Bui Thi Me, then Minister of Health of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Viet Nam, as saying, when welcoming her to a liberated zone: “We are part of the worldwide family of militant women. The oceans cannot dampen our feelings of solidarity and love.”

One of the most powerful and often understated components of the movement against the war in Viet Nam was the unprecedented wide-scale revolt inside all branches of the US Armed Forces that essentially led to the breakdown of the military’s ability to wage war—the US military in all branches became unmanageable. At its height, the GI movement involved nearly half of all enlisted personnel. There were 300 antiwar GI newspapers, and many antiwar GI coffeehouses near bases throughout the US. For soldiers of color, who were predominantly fighting and dying on the front lines allegedly for “democracy” the contradictions were even greater, as activists inside the US struggled and sometimes died for a democracy that had so long been denied. On the battlefield itself, there were numerous incidents of rebellion, including “fragging”—the killing of officers by enlisted men. Even official statistics record hundreds of successful fraggings—and those only include incidents using explosives, not rifles or other means, nor the many threats of fragging that curtailed officer orders.  By 1970, the US Army recorded 65,643 desertions, roughly the equivalent of four divisions. There were also many thousands of draft refusals and an active draft resistance movement, including demonstrations such as Stop-the-Draft Week in Oakland, California and the public burning of draft cards in many cities.
http://depts.washington.edu/antiwar/gi_mvmt.shtml
https://libcom.org/history/1961-1973-gi-resistance-in-the-vietnam-war



We will fight and fight from this generation to the next - 1969. May 19: Birthday of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, two great revolutionary fighters for social justice and national liberation.

"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."
― Unidentified U.S. Army major, Bến Tre, Viet Nam, February 7, 1968.
On Lynching and the Ku Klux Klan by Ho Chi Minh - 1924
Interview with Vo Nguyen Giap about People's War and Diên Bin Phû
Viet Nam War & Resistance Timeline

NOTE: MARVIN X ENDURED EXILE AND FEDERAL PRISON OPPOSING THE VIET NAM WAR


By the late 1960s Marvin X was a central figure in the Black Arts Movement in coast to coast and had become part of the Nation of Islam, changing his name to El Muhajir and following Elijah Muhammad. Like the heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, Marvin X refused his induction to fight in Vietnam. But unlike Ali, Marvin X, along with several other members of the Nation of Islam in California, decided to evade arrest. In 1967 he escaped to Canada but was later arrested in Belize. He chastised the court for punishing him for refusing to be inducted into an army for the purpose of securing White Power throughout the world before he was sentenced to five months imprisonment. His statement was published in the journal The Black Scholar in 1971.
Despite his reputation as an activist, Marvin X was also an intellectual, and a celebrated writer. He was most concerned with the problem of using language created by whites in order to argue for freedom from white power.





Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Mumia Abu Jamal Health Update


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Prison refuses Mumia Medical Care


HiMarvin,

Mumia is still in medical danger. He is weak, in the infirmary, and still needs a wheelchair to come out to visits. In a phone call on Monday his voice was hesitant and lacked its usual vibrancy.   
  
Yesterday, the PA Department of Corrections notified Mumia’s Attorney Bret Grote (of the Abolitionist Law Center) that it would:
  1. Not allow Mumia to be examined by his own doctor;
  2. Not allow Mumia to be examined by a endocrinologist (diabetes specialist);
  3. And they denied access for the doctor to communicate with prison medical staff to assist or direct Mumia’s care; and the Prison has refused to provide for regular phone calls between Mumia and his doctor. Currently, Mumia can only use the phone every other day for only 15 minutes, as the infirmary does not have phone access.
Mumia is being held in the very infirmary that caused his chronic conditions of eczema and late-onset diabetes to become life-threatening. The medical personnel on site were prevented from ordering tests when he was ill in mid-March, and are under the same prison/corporate restrictions today. One postive note, at this time Mumia is being allowed to monitor his own blood sugar multiple times a day, and he is receiving insulin. Since Mumia was hospitalized in ICU on March 30th with life threatening complications from chronic conditions we have been advocating for his treatment. We have to step up our efforts.


Take Action Now! 

Demand that the Department of Corrections permit Mumia to have an examination by his doctor! Click here to call and fax the Prison and State officials and state our demands. 


Pam Africa, Abdul Jon, and Johanna Fernandez visited with Mumia at SCI Mahanoy. 
We have 11 days left to reach $40,000 for Mumia

In just 20 days, 465 supporters from around the world have defended Mumia's life by raising $24,837! Now, with 11 days left, we need to reach $40,000 to get Mumia the care he critically needs!

Have you given yet? Now is the time.

We are pursuing every step necessary to get a medical care team to see Mumia.

Please join us by helping Mumia’s medical fund reach $40K now! We're asking you to contribute $1,000, $250 or even $8 to the medical fund that will save Mumia's life. bit.ly/rise4mumia 
#DefendMumiasLife 
Rise For Mumia

Prison Radio Commentaries:


"PSA Urgent Alert to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal" (1:04) by Cornel West


"Of Punks, Predators and Pigs" (1:37) by Mumia Abu-Jamal

"A Message for MOVE" (6:12) by Janine Africa
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University of Chicago celebrates Sun Ra's 100 birthday



Why Sun Ra Is Dominating Chicago’s Culture Scene

The father of Afrofuturism and onetime local is having a big influence on six artists’ upcoming projects. What gives?

The artist Nick Cave models a Sun Ra-influenced Soundsuit on March 20   Photo: Brian Sorg

May marks the centennial of the birth of Herman Blount, the father of Afrofuturism. Born in Alabama, Blount moved to Chicago in 1946, claiming that aliens from Saturn had told him to quit school and take up music.

He changed his name to Sun Ra, and by the 1970s he was at the helm of a cultural movement that was a bizarre concoction of science fiction, African American history, magical realism, and free jazz. Twenty years after Blount’s death, interest in Afrofuturism is surging.

“Part of what’s appealing about Sun Ra to artists is the fact that he was not constrained to a single medium,” says John Corbett, co-owner of Corbett vs. Dempsey, a gallery in Wicker Park that collects Blount’s early work. “[It’s] a sensibility that’s very current.”

To meet six innovative Chicago artists with new projects influenced by Sun Ra, see below.
 
Sun Ra
The Guru

Sun Ra, 1914–1993

Photo: Chris Felver/Getty Images

Six Other Afrofuturism Acolytes Worth Checking Out

David Boykin
The Sax Man

David Boykin, 44

Photo: Scott Strazzante/Chicago Tribune
On any given Sunday, you can find multi-instrumentalist David Boykin jamming with other free-jazz aficionados at the University of Chicago Arts Incubator in Washington Park. “Sun Ra was among some of the first records I heard, it was totally an awakening,” says the Greater Grand Crossing musician who started playing jazz in college. “[Sun Ra’s] music always sounded like it was happening right now. No one else sounded like that.” On Sun Ra’s birthday, May 22, Boykin plans to invite 100 saxophone players to salute to the musician at the Arts Incubator (301 E. Garfield Blvd.). They’ll kick things off with “Happy Birthday,” naturally.

Nick Cave
The Performance Artist

Nick Cave, 55

Photo: Ratko Radojcic
Walking into Nick Cave’s South Loop studio—a behemoth of a loft littered with piles of branches, neon-dyed hair, and thousands of vintage tchotchkes—is like entering a wacky, warped world that is at once tribal and futuristic. Famous for his wearable Soundsuits (opulent assemblages that are part sculpture, part dance performance), Cave has long said he culls inspiration from Sun Ra’s eccentric rhythms and choreography. “I think we just need to keep everything funky and keep it moving,” says the artist, who, like Sun Ra, often performs in costumes that play off ritual African dress. Cave will perform on May 2 in Millennium Park at the School of the Art Institute’s annual fashion show. For tickets, saicfashion.org.

Lupe Fiasco
The Rapper-Writer

Lupe Fiasco, 32

Photo: Paul A. Hebert/Invision/AP
This South Side hip-hop artist known for polarizing public appearances is also a burgeoning author. Last December, he began writing a noir-Afrofuturist novel on Twitter about Teriyaki Joe, a Harlem detective. The blaxploitation–meets–Double Indemnity project has 1.3 million followers, who get frequent updates such as “.45 on the desk. Digital cigar burning. Sun-Ra coming out the speakers. Antique Rick Ross poster on the wall.” The account is private, so you’ll have to request access to @LupeFiasco.

Jamal Moss
The Sound Artist

Jamal Moss, 40

Photo: Celeste Sloman
A musician who uses the stage name Hieroglyphic Being, Jamal Moss has recorded over 300 experimental electronic tracks and outlined another 3,000, all rich with spiraling, atonal melodies inspired by Sun Ra’s 1967 album Strange Strings. In March, Moss recorded an album with Marshall Allen, the sax player who has led Sun Ra’s band, the Arkestra, since its leader’s death. “[Sun Ra] stuck to his guns . . . no matter how many people might have ridiculed him,” says Moss, whose new untitled record is set to hit the shelves this fall. “He carved a niche for himself on this planet.” For a taste of Moss’s music, hear the song “A Synthetic Love Life.”

Jeff Parker
The Guitarist

Jeff Parker, 47

Photo: Jim Newberry
This seasoned avant-garde guitarist and backbone of the band Tortoise says the 1970 album My Brother the Wind “opened my mind to a lot of experimental stuff.” His side project Isotope 217 also pays homage to Sun Ra with a noisy synth-heavy sound that Parker says is influenced by the Afrofuturist’s 1974 film Space Is the Place. “He is a very important musician to me conceptually, just in terms of having a more metaphysical, spiritual connection through your music. . . .[Afrofuturism] is a cultural reflection of what African Americans are dealing with in their art.”

Cauleen Smith
The Filmmaker

Cauleen Smith, 46

For this Kenwood artist and experimental filmmaker, inspiration struck while standing in line at the DMV. “There was one song in particular, called ‘Love in Outer Space.’ I just listened to it over and over and over. I was like, I should be wanting to kill myself right now, but I feel great,” says the artist. Smith became a Sun Ra scholar of sorts and has spent the past four years knee-deep in his archives at the University of Chicago and the West Loop gallery Threewalls. Recently, she has been weaving his writings on American politics and the black diaspora into multimedia installations, including the one on view at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas through May 3.
Bonus: Here’s a behind the scenes look at the photo shoot with Nick Cave, as he tries out the Soundsuit in our lead photo.
 
Black Arts Movement Poet Marvin X coming to UC for Sun Ra celebration


Marvin X and Sun Ra at Marvin X's Black Educational Theatre, Fillmore District, San Francisco, 1972. Sun Ra and Marvin X both lectured in the Black Studies Department, University of California, Berkeley during this time. Marvin performed coast to coast with Sun Ra's Arkestra, reciting his poetry. Sun Ra arranged the musical version of Marvin's play Flowers for the Trashman, retitled Take Care of Business. They produced a five hour concert at San Francisco's Harding Theatre, with a cast of fifty, including the cast of TCB, Arkestra, Ellendar Barne dancers, Raymond Sawyer Dancers.

Black Bird Press News & Review: Notes on Yemen: Crusaders, Zionists, Sunnis, Shiites

Black Bird Press News & Review: Notes on Yemen: Crusaders, Zionists, Sunnis, Shiites

Did you hear about the black man killed by the pigs this month?


Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Novelist Toni Morrison on White Supremacy

Acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison, while promoting her new novel God Help the Child, proved that she’s certainly not insulated from the racial climate in America. Morrison has often written about race, and explained in The Telegraph why she’s grown tired of people who keep calling for a conversation on race.
Writer Toni MOrrison is writing pieces for Chipotles cups and paper bags. www.naturallymoi.com
.
“People keep saying, ‘We need to have a conversation about race,’” she explains. “This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back,” Morrison says. “And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”
Morrison is drawing attention to the disparity of how blacks are policed in comparison to other communities. Recently a black man in South Carolina was fatally shot in the back as he fled a police officer. The officer wasn’t arrested until video of the incident surfaced.
Morrison explained during the interview that we’re having a hard time getting past racism because there’s so much money in it.
“Race is the classification of a species. And we are the human race, period. But the other thing – the hostility, the racism – is the money-maker. And it also has some emotional satisfaction for people who need it.” She explains that slavery “moved this country closer to the economy of an industrialized Europe, far in advance of what it would have been.”
In a separate NPR interview, Morrison discussed why categorizing people by skin tone is problematic.
“Distinguishing color — light, black, in between — as the marker for race is really an error: It’s socially constructed, it’s culturally enforced and it has some advantages for certain people,” she says. “But this is really skin privilege — the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color.”

Black Bird Press News & Review: Video: Cornel West on The Black Arts Movement 27 City Tour

Black Bird Press News & Review: Video: Cornel West on The Black Arts Movement 27 City Tour

Black Bird Press News & Review: P-SPAN #413: Panel on Black Women Writers, at Laney College

Black Bird Press News & Review: P-SPAN #413: Panel on Black Women Writers, at Laney College

Monday, April 20, 2015

Parable of a happy dope fiend and Dope Man Blues by Marvin X


In memory of Rick

Rick was a happy dope fiend. He loved shooting dope in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, though he used to shoot dope in the Fillmore, but that was in the old days when the Fillmore was jumping, bumper to bumper cars, Negroes with big hats and long coats, ladies strutting like peacocks. Jazz clubs everywhere. That was before Negro removal came to town. When Negro removal came, Rick started hanging out in the TL, that funky multi-ethnic ghetto a block from downtown.

He was happy in the TL, along with all the other dope fiends, sex workers, derelicts , mentally ill, homeless and working poor.

Whenever Rick was on the streets of the TL, he had a big smile and laughed so hard you had to laugh with him, even if what he was laughing about wasn't funny.

He dressed clean like a real dope fiend from the old days when dope was good, not like that punk dope they have today.

Sometimes Rick would be in the middle of the street loaded to the gills, laughing out loud with one of his dope fiend friends.

Then something happened to Rick. He disappeared for awhile. We heard he was in a drug recovery program. We were happy for him.

He came out of recovery a changed man. He got a job driving yellow cab. He moved out the TL to Oakland. He'd found a house, bought two cars, one a Cadillac Seville.

But when we ran into Rick he was somber, quiet, mellowed out, didn't laugh anymore. He wasn't the Rick we knew. But he was clean and sober, had money in his pocket. But he didn't have that old smile, the laughter was gone.

Time passed.

We saw Rick one day down in the BART or subway station. He was with a girl. She was telling him to hurry up, come on. Rick did as he was told. He had a smile and was laughing.

It was the last time we saw Rick. We know he died happy, doing his thing.
--Marivn X
4/12/10
Dope Man Blues

    Hey, Mister Dope Man
    please bring ma dope
    please mister dope man
    bring ma hope
    hurry dope man
    wit proper dope
    ain't no hope
    witout dope
    come right mister dope man
    get me high as a kite
    give me dat paramedic blast
    to the future and da past
    let me see thangs dat ain't dare
    spare me dem punk bitch ass nigguhs
    spare me dem squares
    hurry mister dope man
    come take me dare
    come wit justice
    don't play wit da scales
    Maa'at will get yo ass
    litter dan a feather
    come right dope man
    let me see dat dope sparkle
    Peruvian flake
    gimme dat 30 hitter shit
    don't be fake
    Call da paramedics! dis dope too good
    dis what a nigguh need
    down here in da hood!
    Hey, dope main
    gimme dope make me sane
    gimme truth dope fada mind
    brainwash me dope
    better get in line!

--Marvin X 4/20/15


Black Bird Press News & Review: Parable of the Black Bourgeoisie

Black Bird Press News & Review: Parable of the Black Bourgeoisie: The economic and political dependence of this African neo-colonial bourgeoisie is reflected in its culture of apenmanship and parrotry enforced on a restive population through police boots, barbed wire, a gowned clergy and judiciary; their ideas are spread by a corpus of state intellectuals, the academic and journalistic laureates of the neo-colonial establishment.
--Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonizing the Mind

Marvin X and Fahizah Alim, longtime friends. He was her teacher, she is writer emeritus at the Sacramento Bee. At the Sacramento Bee she was Lois Lane and Superwoman for the Sacramento Blacks.

BK Nation public forum in NYC