State Terrorism: Attica prison massacre, 1971

Remembering Attica Prison: The ‘Bloodiest One-Day Encounter Between Americans Since The Civil War’

US Judge ready to unseal documents on 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion

"If we can't live as men, we sure as hell can die as men"
- Attica prisoner

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York's attorney general has asked a state judge to unseal documents about the 1971 riot and retaking of Attica state prison, the nation's bloodiest inmate rebellion.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman wants the court in Wyoming County to open hundreds of detailed pages about the five September days when inmates took control of the maximum-security prison in rural western New York until state troopers and guards stormed the facility.

Schneiderman says it's time to bring transparency to what he referred to as one of state government's darkest chapters. The sealed documents are part of a 1975 report by a special commission that examined New York's efforts to investigate the riot and its aftermath.

In all, 11 staff and 32 inmates died — all but four shot by authorities.

1971: The Attica prison uprising

Against the background of the mass revolutionary, black power and prisoners' movements in the US, a four day revolt began on September 13, 1971 at the Attica Correctional Facility near Buffalo, NY in the United States. Its repression left 39 people killed.

"If we can't live as men, we sure as hell can die as men"
- Attica prisoner

In 1970 the National Guard had gunned down unarmed students protesting against the Vietnam War at Jackson State and Kent State Universities. Armed guards smashed a Teamsters truckers' strike. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had both been murdered. When George Jackson, Black Panther and political prisoner was murdered at San Quentin by the guards on August 21, 1971, his book "Soledad Brother" was being passed from prisoner to prisoner, tensions were running mounting. A prisoners' rights movement was growing.

Attica was surrounded by a 30-foot wall, 2 feet thick, with fourteen gun towers. 54% of the inmates were black; 100% of the guards were white, many of whom were openly racist. Prisoners spent fourteen to sixteen hours a day in their cells, their mail was read, their reading material restricted, their visits from families conducted through a mesh screen, their medical care disgraceful, their parole system inequitable, racism everywhere. How perceptive the prison administration was about these conditions can be measured by the comment of the superintendent of Attica, Vincent Mancusi, when the uprising began: “Why are they destroying their home?”

Most of the Attica prisoners were there as a result of plea bargaining. Of 32,000 felony indictments a year in New York State, 4,000 to 5,000 were tried. The rest (about 75%) were disposed of by deals made under duress, called “plea bargaining,” described as follows in the Report of the Joint Legislative Committee on Crime in New York:

The final climactic act in the plea bargaining procedure is a charade which in itself has aspects of dishonesty which rival the original crime in many instances. The accused is made to assert publicly his guilt on a specific crime, which in many cases he has not committed; in some cases he pleads guilty to a non-existing crime. He must further indicate that he is entering his plea freely… and that he is not doing so because of any promises made to him.

In plea bargaining, the accused pleads guilty, whether he is or not, and saves the state the trouble of a trial in return for the promise of a less severe punishment.

When Attica prisoners were up for parole, the average time of their hearing, including the reading of the file and deliberation among the three members, was 5.9 minutes. Then the decision was handed out, with no explanation.

The official report on the Attica uprising tells how an inmate-instructed sociology class there became a forum for ideas about change. Then there was a series of organised protest efforts, and in July an inmate manifesto setting forth a series of moderate demands, after which “tensions at Attica had continued to mount,” culminating in a day of protest over the killing of George Jackson at San Quentin, during which few inmates ate at lunch and dinner on a hunger strike, and many wore black armbands.

Uprising
On September 9. 1971, a series of conflicts between prisoners and guards ended with a relatively minor incident, involving a guard disciplining two prisoners. This was the spark that set off the revolt a group which began when a group of inmates from D Block broke through a gate with a defective weld and taking over one of the four prison yards, with forty guards as hostages.

Then followed five days in which the prisoners set up a remarkable community in the yard. A group of citizen-observers, invited by the prisoners, included New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, who wrote (A Time to Die): “The racial harmony that prevailed among the prisoners—it was absolutely astonishing... That prison yard was the first place I have ever seen where there was no racism.” One black prisoner later said: “I never thought whites could really get it on. . . . But I can’t tell you what the yard was like, I actually cried it was so close, everyone so together." All the prisoners - black, Latino, white - who took part in the revolt were united. It was no "race riot" but a united class action.

The prisoners demanded removal of the warden, amnesty for those who had taken part in the revolt, and better conditions. The state agreed to 28 of the 33 demands but not amnesty. The prisoners were not willing to back down on this, as they knew repression would fall heavily on them.

Repression

After five days, the state lost patience. Governor Nelson Rockefeller approved a military attack on the prison (see Cinda Firestone’s stunning film Attica). One thousand National Guardsmen, prison guards, and local police went in with automatic rifles, carbines, and submachine guns in a full-scale assault on the prisoners, who had no firearms. Thirty-one prisoners were killed. The first stories given the press by prison authorities said that nine guards held hostage had their throats slashed by the prisoners during the attack. The official autopsies almost immediately showed this to be false: the nine guards died in the same hail of bullets that killed the prisoners.

Guards beat and tortured prisoners after the revolt. A wave of other prison rebellions spread like wildfire, involving 20,000 people.

Today
There were several hundred thousand in prison in 1971 - now there are two million. The memory of Attica is still there - in 2004 prisoners in Texas started a hunger strike on the 33rd anniversary to commemorate the Attica uprising and to support prisoners' rights.

OCRed by Linda Towlson and lightly edited by libcom - US to UK spelling, additional details, clarifications and links added - from two articles by Howard Zinn and the Anarchist Federation.

Book: Negroland, A Memoir

 

Negroland: A Memoir

by Margo Jefferson

Pantheon, 248 pp., $25.00

The house Negro, according to Malcolm X, looked out for his master’s interest and put the field Negro back in his place on the plantation when he got out of line. The house Negro lived better than the field Negro, Malcolm X explained. He ate the same food as the master, dressed and spoke just as well. The house Negro loved the master more than the master loved himself, while the field Negro prayed for a strong wind to come along should the master’s house catch fire. Malcolm X said that he was a field Negro and for him the black establishment, the black upper class, became synonymous with the house Negro. “You’re nothing but an ex-slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You are ex-slaves. You didn’t come here on the ‘Mayflower.’ You came here on a slave ship.”

The black elite provoked some scorn in the civil rights era of revolution in mass black consciousness. In The Negro Family in the United States (1939), E. Franklin Frazier had described how migration and the urbanization of black America changed the criteria by which a black upper class defined itself. Bloodline gave way to position. In his grand remonstrance, Black Bourgeoisie (1957), Frazier castigated the black upper class for having deteriorated into a sad imitation of conspicuously consuming white America. Others criticized black institutions for being conformist. For figures like Malcolm X, the history of black resistance exposed the futility of conventional avenues of struggle, as if illustrating Foucault’s point about the moral training of populations and the reform of manners as a means of reducing threat to property. Whether it was seen as politically impotent or socially up its own ass, the black elite was an irrelevance at a time when the forces of liberation were out to reshape the world; and when the vernacular was being elevated as the true source of black culture.

The idea of an Old Settler’s temperament in a black person seemed absurd. In his 1965 autobiography, Long Old Road, the distinguished sociologist Horace R. Cayton wrote about leaving Seattle in response to increased racism and running away to sea, where he befriended a veteran black sailor named Longreen who was unfamiliar with his past:

Of course I didn’t mention to Longreen anything about my grandfather being a senator or that we had once had a horse and carriage and a Japanese servant. He wouldn’t have believed me if I had, and I’d learned by then that with the general run of Negroes it was better not to refer to such an elegant background.

Just as white people in New York descended from Dutch colonists thought of themselves as Old Settlers, so, too, did black people already living in northern cities before the mass migration of mostly black agricultural workers from the South during World War I, especially upper-class blacks who were somewhat tolerated because they were few. Cayton’s father’s newspaper only became a black publication after the war, when so many blacks moved to Seattle that he lost his white advertisers. He had to remind his son that although one of Cayton’s grandfathers had been the first black US senator, the other had been a slave, as had he, his father.

In Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), the landmark work on Chicago that Cayton wrote with St. Clair Drake, the black upper class was, significantly, not a leisure class but a largely professional one that supplied goods and services to the Negro community. In the cold war days immediately after World War II, race leadership still came from the upper class. Its members fought segregation in every aspect and resented being told that they were trying to be white or to mix socially with whites. Because of segregation, blacks of all classes lived in close proximity. It was not poverty that upper-class blacks minded, Drake and Cayton said, so much as lack of decorum. Most black people in Chicago at the time of their study were employed as laborers.
Cayton was also clear that writing his autobiography was an attempt at self-reclamation. In the late 1930s and into the 1940s he had been a part of a vigorous scene of black intellectuals in Chicago, described in Lawrence P. Jackson’s important The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (2011). Yet after World War II, its promises of freedom unanswered, he became increasingly bitter in his lectures, and as a community-center director he worried that he was little more than a stooge for the white man. One day he woke up in his office with a pistol in his hand. His autobiography ends not long after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, with him fighting depression and alcoholism, trying to start over, heading back out West. Horace Cayton would die in 1970 in Paris, where he was doing research for a biography of his friend Richard Wright. The black autobiographical tradition does not have many losers.

Margo Jefferson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1995, has nothing to prove and everything to say in Negroland, her brave, elegantly written memoir of growing up black and different. Born into the self-contained world of upper-class black Chicago that Drake and Cayton studied, Jefferson and her older sister spent their formative years, the 1950s and 1960s, in the bourgeois enclave of Hyde Park, daughters of the head of pediatrics at Provident Hospital, the oldest black hospital in the country, and a glamorous mother whose photograph could appear in the black press. Jefferson attended the famously progressive University of Chicago Laboratory School and High School. “Negroland is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty,” she says.

Class in black America has “a fraught history with many roots,” its distinctions going back to whether blacks were free or slave; northerner or southerner; property owner or unskilled worker; literate or not; light-skinned or not. Jefferson herself is descended in part from the Negro elite that was defined early on by how much it had to do with white people, its relation to white people, its nearness to them, by occupation, such as caterer or barber, or blood, even a former slave master’s. But after characterizing them this way, she writes, “I’ve fallen into a mocking tone that feels prematurely disloyal. There were antebellum founders of Negroland who triumphed through resolve and principled intelligence.” The severity of the black condition explains why blacks who could do so accepted the protection that identification with powerful whites offered. But she also recognizes that “Negro exceptionalism had its ugly side: pioneers who advanced through resolve, intelligence, and exploiting their own.” For example, we know now that one of the first legal slaveholders in seventeenth-century Virginia was an African man.

Jefferson unearths works such as Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society, published in 1841 in Philadelphia by Joseph Willson, a dentist and printer, the son of a Georgia slaveholder and an enslaved woman whom he freed before she bore his five children. In 1858, Cyprian Clamorgan, a barber descended from a prominent white St. Louis family, published The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. Jefferson notes the difference in style between Willson’s pride in his family’s quiet success and Clamorgan’s bragging about his white ancestors and large income. She takes her early examples of the black elite seriously and gives them their due, understanding their flaws and limitations, like family.
Jefferson has a deep sympathy for intellectual black women in the nineteenth century—poet and diarist Charlotte Forten; teacher and essayist Anna Julia Cooper, who received her doctorate from the Sorbonne when she was sixty-five years old; Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching crusading journalist; and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, founder of a finishing school in North Carolina for black girls. Jefferson writes that W.E.B. Du Bois, who was born in 1868 and published his first book, The Philadelphia Negro, in 1899, “shares Cooper’s radical romanticism” as well as “Wells’s outrage,” but that “he is intent on cutting a much wider swath, sometimes at their expense.” On recordings, his voice resembles FDR’s.
Perhaps because of the influence of northern abolitionists or the New England schoolteachers who went south to teach the freedmen during Reconstruction, the image of the stern, stringent Bostonian replaced the doomed, noble southern aristocrat as the class ideal for black people largely trained at anxious black-church colleges. But for black America social status came to depend mostly on what an individual had achieved, precisely because individual achievement was not separate from the advancement of the black race as a whole. What Du Bois described in his 1903 essay “The Talented Tenth” was not an abstraction. In his vision, the few would lead the many. It was not where you were from that mattered but rather where you were headed.

What was forgotten in the protests of the 1960s—a period when black people began to enter the middle classes in meaningful numbers—was that for more than a century the sheer existence of a black upper class had represented a challenge to the racial status quo. The people in Jefferson’s world benefited from the civil rights movement as much as any black people did. But the social mobility of black people was not, for her, a testament to the openness of American society. Jefferson learned early that her family was where it was in spite of American society. On one road trip in 1956, her family traveled happily to Quebec and then New York, but a hotel in Atlantic City wouldn’t put them in the suite they’d reserved. They left the next day:

Such treatment encouraged privileged Negroes to see our privilege as more than justified: It was hard-won and politically righteous, a boon to the race, a source of compensatory pride, an example of what might be achieved.

They were not a normal family, not like the ones Jefferson saw on television or at the movies. Her parents had to do careful research before holidays in order to make sure things would be okay for them when they got to where they were going, and even then something could still happen. In the 1950s,

liberal whites who saw that we too had manners, money, and education lamented our caste disadvantage. Less liberal or non-liberal whites preferred not to see us in the private schools and public spaces of their choice. They had ready a bevy of slights: from skeptics the surprised glance and spare greeting; from waverers the pleasantry, eyes averted; from disdainers the direct cut. Caucasians with materially less than us were given license by Caucasians with more than them to subvert and attack our privilege.

Her mother told her a lot of white people did not like to address a Negro as “Doctor.” It would seem little compared to, say, the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 for the crime of supposedly having whistled at a white woman, but mob violence and casual disrespect had roots in the same license to attack black people. Trouble knows your name, James Baldwin said.
Yet Jefferson is describing a world of black confidence, not one of uncomprehending imitation or secret self-loathing. It matters that she grew up in Chicago when she did. In her youth, Chicago was the undisputed second city, a manufacturing powerhouse divided into ethnic zones. Violence often attended the spread of the black population. Black Chicago was large and had capital, substantial enterprises, and strong churches. Black institutions still had prestige in the black community. Negroland was real:

In Negroland we thought of ourselves as the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians. Like the Third Eye, the Third Race possessed a wisdom, intuition, and enlightened knowledge the other two races lacked. Its members had education, ambition, sophistication, and standardized verbal dexterity.

Home life took place in and around Fortress Negro. “In the privacy of an all-Negro world, Negro privilege could lounge and saunter too, show off its accoutrements and lay down the law.” Jefferson writes about the group activities of childhood and the extracurricular schedule of her adolescence as rituals of cohesion, tribal defense against the social disorganization of black life in general. However, though she may have been born into Negroland, education was a mixed-race experience. She had access to white high schools and exclusive music camps. In her memoir, Jefferson takes up distinctions between classes and races, but also between genders, and it is as a girl’s coming-of-age story, a black girl’s story, in a time of social change, that Negroland explores yet more unexpected territory.

Women were conveyors of racial inheritance. Jefferson’s mother was present to correct her always. In one scene, she recounts how amused she and her sister were by what they considered the ignorant country language of the speaker, an old black woman, in the Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son”: “Well, son, I’ll tell you:/Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” Their mother listened, then explained who Hughes was, and then read the poem for them, calling on “all the resources of Negro life and history,…turning dialect to vernacular.” Her mother, who grew up on Negro History Week, let them know that Hughes had even taught briefly at the Lab School.

Dorothy Dandridge, 1953; photograph by Philippe Halsman

The owners of The Chicago Defender, a leading black newspaper, were their friends, and they were aware that Ida B. Wells had worked in Chicago. Jefferson’s mother told them about the anthropologist Katherine Dunham and that major work of sociology, Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton. Her family read The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP . They were not white people; they knew that Rosa Parks was not a Negro woman suddenly too tired to change seats, but rather the secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the NAACP that had been meticulously preparing its challenge to segregation on municipal buses.
Jefferson grew up knowing that the women responsible for her believed in “feminine command.” “It’s never too hot for fur,” her grandmother said on a visit back to the South. As young black women, she and her sister were learning how to comport themselves as ladies. It was a kind of vindication. That nice-girl problem of how to attract boys without getting a reputation was further complicated by the history of black women forever being depicted in American culture as oversexed and animalistic, which justified the exploitation of their bodies. Respectability was therefore a grave matter. Nice black girls learned that women of achievement renounced vanity and lightheartedness, exhibited unceasing fortitude, and put the needs of others first. “I enjoy being irreproachable,” Jefferson writes.
The cost of self-control was easily underestimated. “Oh, the vehement inner lives of girls snatching at heroines and role models!” Meanwhile, as a nice black girl Jefferson was judged by standards of beauty that were of social history’s making: grade of hair, skin color, flat or straight nose, size of ass, shape of foot. Whiteness. “The fashion and beauty complex has so many ways to enchant and maim.” She takes pride in and has sympathy for Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, but conceives a teenager’s passion for Audrey Hepburn. “No! You cannot ever be white like these idols of feminine perfection. Let that final impossibility reproach and taunt you.”
Jefferson’s story becomes more and more about gender difference and where it intersects with race after she graduates from Brandeis College in 1968. Eventually, she is conspicuous as the only black woman columnist at Newsweek magazine. “The white world had made the rules that excluded us; now, when it saw fit, it altered those rules to include a few of us.” Her childhood is about Negroland at its segregated zenith, but childhood is a woman’s story waiting to happen, one influenced by—if not directly about—the feminist movement of the 1970s.
Jefferson is touchingly honest about her inhibited response to the black feminist sensation of that era, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuff (1976). Shange, born Paulette Williams, was a nice black girl and Barnard College graduate who’d gone off the rails. However, Jefferson summons to the rescue the figure of Florynce Kennedy, the great activist lawyer in a cowboy hat, a beloved presence in radical circles in 1970s New York. Many black women back then argued that feminism was a white woman’s thing and that if you scratched a white feminist you would find simply a white person. It was more important to address social needs along racial lines. Kennedy answered that black women had been copying bad ideas from white women for so long it was crazy when they came along with a good one not to want to copy that:

[The black woman’s] history of struggle, degradation, triumph; her exclusion from the rewards of bourgeois femininity; her duty to strengthen the Negro family. Not a history one wanted to haul through one’s social life. Not a history one wanted to lumber into the sexual revolution with. Not a history one wanted to have sternly codified by white sociologists and Black Power revolutionaries who found the faults of The Black Woman much the same as those of The Negro Woman. She was bellicose, she was self-centered; she was sexually prudish when not castrating.

When Jefferson was growing up, race mattered, but gender didn’t. The fight for women’s rights was greeted with “mockery, contempt, or repressive tolerance.” Girls of her class were encouraged to take certain privileges for granted, but these privileges were designed to make them eligible for good marriages, i.e., yet more social status, and they were taught to “cherish that generic female future.” Black women historically had entered the white-collar workforce faster than black men, because of the relatively low status of clerical and secretarial work, and most of the black professional women Jefferson knew of as a girl were also wives and mothers. Sometimes she was warned to have something to fall back on, an acknowledgment that the black man’s economic life could be insecure. At the same time, a woman alone was an object of pity or whispers.
The question Jefferson asks of her experience was: How could she adapt her willful self to so much history and myth? The answer is that she didn’t. There is, in her account, no accommodation or acceptance of middle-class standards and life. This isn’t a memoir that tells us how a black person with opportunities got over her guilt and relaxed into the life of getting ahead that her family had sacrificed for her to have. She made instead a life as a journalist and critic and then another life in the high bohemia of New York intellectuals and artists, away from the conventions of her male-dominated professional world. “All that circumnavigating of race, class, and gender made for comedy too.”

Jefferson’s answer is also in her sophisticated tone and style, in the free and open manner in which Negroland is structured. Her book includes many brief anecdotes, digressions, and “dialogues” between unnamed characters. Paragraph headings announce “The Jefferson Girls,” “The Jefferson Girls and Ballet,” “The Jefferson Girls and Beauty,” “Another Negro History Week Lesson,” or “Boys.” What marks Negroland off from other works on such a potentially cringe-inducing subject is Jefferson’s literary sensibility: “I’m a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.” Some of her most intense passages have to do with her instinctive escape into Lewis Carroll or her immersion in the personalities of the sisters in Little Women and what their destinies portended for her.

Identity is fluid. “There’s a space in our consciousness where all this racialized material collects, never static, mutating or at least recombining.” Jefferson struggles with her own reticence. “I think it’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about race,” she observes. “You revere your grief.” Though she knows she has had more choices, and therefore more freedom, than most, there remained lines she dared not cross. Black girls in Negroland “had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity.”

Charlotte Forten, granddaughter of a rich, free-born black Philadelphia sail maker, kept a diary and went south in 1862 to teach freed slaves in South Carolina. Her diary stops when she falls in love with moonlit rides on horseback alongside a married white doctor from Boston. When her diary resumes many years later, she is the prim wife of a black minister from a prominent family much like her own. Angela Davis, who comes from a middle-class household in Birmingham, Alabama, and graduated from Brandeis four years earlier than Jefferson, refuses in her Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974) to write about herself as exceptional in any way—a principle dictated by her politics, her allegiance to her constituencies, rejecting the romanticism of her own image, a keeping faith with the four girls killed in the church bombing in Birmingham in 1963. “Internalize The Race. Internalize both races,” Jefferson says at one point. “Then internalize the contradictions. Teach your psyche to adapt its solo life to a group obbligato. Or let it abandon any impulse toward independence and hurtle toward a feverishly perfect representation of your people.”

The constant for black men has been the threat of violence; the constant for black women has been that they were still women. Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen got kicked out of Fisk University for wearing bright colors. A’Lelia Bundles’s On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (2001), a biography of her great-grandmother, the founder of a black cosmetics industry; Jill Nelson’s Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island (2005); Gail Lumet Buckley’s The Hornes: An American Family (1986) and her recent The Black Calhouns: From Civil War to Civil Rights with One African American Family—these works are personal as well as acts of retrieval and conservation. The authors can see themselves in the continuum of the histories they are recording. But Jefferson is coming at the subject of the black elite from an odd angle, examining it as a legacy of proscription and privilege, grief and achievement, love for, and shame because of, other black people; love for and terror of so-called white culture. “My enemies took too much. My loved ones asked too much.”

The closest thing to her homage to ambiguity—from another nice black girl—is avant-garde playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s experimental autobiography, People Who Led to My Plays (1987). The new Americans must be able to think in contradictions, Henry Adams said in his Education. “Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can’t imagine you,” Jefferson says. “That’s your first education.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
www.blackeducator.blogspot.com
If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor. (Haiti)
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Posted by: "S. E. Anderson"

From the archives: Marvin X on gun violence: level the playing field--Everybody Pack!

"I like the idea of a 'designated packer' similar to the designated driver. "--Marvin X

 

Police: Suspect stockpiled arsenal

Violence is as American as cherry pie!--H. Rap Brown, aka Imam Jamil Al Amin

The murder of my child will not make your child safe.--James Baldwin



The recent mass shooting in a Colorado cinema is an essential part of American culture, a culture steeped in violence, genocide and a plethora of psycho pathologies too numerous to catalogue. In short, America is a society rooted in mental illness. The very idea of claiming equality of all men, yet practicing chattel slavery of kidnapped Africans is schizophrenia of the most morbid kind.

Furthermore, the very idea of a free market economy is not based on fairness or social-economic justice but to obtain the cheapest labor possible and the acquisition of raw materials at the lowest price, including at the point of a gun, hence the trillion dollar US military budget to kill, maim and dominate people around the world.

So how can we imagine living in a peaceful society when we are in permanent war around the world with hundreds of military bases throughout the globe to insure political/economic domination? How can we be so delusional to think there shall be no blow back for American behavior around the world? Surely, we know what goes around comes around!

We need only look at the violence in the hoods of America, aided and abetted by gun sellers often working in conspiracy with government agents, e.g., Fast and Furious, although this was across the border sales, but do not think these same gun sellers do not operate in the hood, spreading their wares to people so desperate from economic deprivation they can only rob and kill each other. We rarely hear of ghetto youth crossing the line into the white side of town to kill white people. If anything, it is most often white police officers (sometimes black officers as well) who act as an occupying army in the hood. White police have a long history (originating with slave catchers) of executing justice upon North American Africans and other minorities.

As Baldwin noted, the murder of my child will not make your child safe, so violence appears in the suburbs from time to time, a reminder that when one child or adult is not safe, no child or adult is safe anywhere in the world.

There is no way America can murder with drones in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, yet
harbor the thought that there shall be peace at home.

As we look for options to stem this violence that is American as cherry pie, we think the only option is to level the playing field by making everyone pack arms at all times, yes, as in the Wild Wild West days. No persons should find themselves in a situation where some crazy fool is armed and we are not.

In the hood, even black bourgeoisie parents have been known to allow their children to arm themselves if they happen to live in or near the hood where there is rampant gang violence. Some parents urge their children to dress down so they do not incur the wrath of poor ghetto youth who may be jealous and envious of their parading in the latest high priced hip hop gear. Here, we see the economic motive that leads to violence. Only when we address the economic inequities and social psychology of American culture well we be able to solve this problem. Until then, it is only sensible to practice self defense at all times and never get caught naked or unarmed. The South learned this lesson long ago. I have friends in the "dirty South" who never go out unarmed, especially down those haunting southern roads.

Up South in the North, the situation is approaching the dirty south. Many of us dare not go out at night, some stay locked inside their homes except for necessary trips outside. Long ago, ancestor Ray Charles told us about the danger zone, "The danger zone is everywhere...." So be aware of your surroundings and as the Boy Scouts taught us, "Be Prepared!" The old Arab adage is, "Trust in God but tie your camel!"
--Marvin X
7/20/12

Support a Black Arts Movement Business District related Film project Alice Street

 BAMBD planner Marvin X was interviewed for the Alice Street film project

photo Bert Johnson, Eastbay Express

We are proud to announce that we are currently in Post-Production for the Alice Street documentary! Today we are releasing our new website, trailer and crowdfunding campaign! Click below to see them all!

To quote from the film, "the level of mastery of this piece must reflect the level of mastery of the artists that we are depicting." We know that we have something relevant and powerful here. We want to ensure that this film is worthy of the community and city whose story we are telling. Up to this point, everything that we have created has been on a shoestring budget, far below that of your typical documentary. Despite our limited resources, we generated 100s of hours of breathtaking content and a powerful story. We need a swelling of community support to translate this effort of love into a powerful film.

Our goal is to raise $12,000. The first $8,000 will be matched by the East Bay Community Foundation, giving us a total of $20,000 from this effort. Its a daunting task. Two years ago, we did our first fundraiser and over 100 people came out to help us meet our goal. This time, we're going to need even more people to step up.

We're asking for you to participate in telling this uniquely Oakland story. Please dig deep and contribute what your heart tells you! We have great premium gifts on our Generosity page to offer you for your contribution. Let your community know about this project and please give generously.

Rally with the National Writers Union

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Solidarity Rally with Locked Out UAW Honeywell Workers!     Follow the NWU!    Rally to Join us in supporting our locked-out sisters and brothers at UAW Local 1508, Honeywell Aerospace! Wednesday, June 15   5:00pm - 7:00pm (Busses will leave from 256 W. 38th St. at 1pm and return by 10pm) Almost 400 workers, members of UAW Local 1508 in Green Island, NY and UAW Local 9 in South Bend, IN, have been locked out by Honeywell Aerospace since May 9. They were locked out after they rejected a contract that would double their health care costs, eliminate their pensions, use non-union sub-contractors and leave them at the mercy of the company. The workers at both plants make braking systems and parts for commercial and military aircraft. Their average pay is $21.83 per hour. Honeywell CEO David Cote's income last year was over $33 million, while Tim Mahoney, the head of Honeywell Aerospace received $8.6 million. What's wrong with this picture? Stand with our locked out brothers and sisters at UAW Local 158 in the fight against corporate greed! To reserve your seat on the bus, contact Scott Sommer: ssommer@uaw.net, or call 212-529-2580. In Solidarity, Larry Goldbetter President

Marvin X's grandson, Jordan, visits home of W.E.B. DuBois in Accra, Ghana, West Africa

Jordan JR Jackmon, Accra Ghana, July, 2016

photo Muhammida El Muhajir

Suport venues in the Black Arts Movement Business District: Geoffery's Inner Circle, Sunday jazz $10.00, dinner $5.00

Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali!

America loves and honors all resistance fighters when they are dead; will even turn them into American heroes, naming streets and schools  after them, even putting them on twenty dollar bills in the case of Harriet Tubman, but will they quote Harriet on the twenty dollar bill when she said, "I could have freed more slaves if they had known they were slaves!" As they say in Houston, Texas, "You better ax somebody!"

 Oh, Billy boy, are you part of the problem or part of the solution? I hear Ali singing from Paradise, "Oh, Allah, look what they did to my song!" And as per  Hillary for president, Dr. Nathan Hare taught us,"The white woman is the white man in drag!" Our esteemed sociologist and clinical psychologist also taught us the "fictive theory," i.e., everything the white man says is fiction, i.e., a lie, until proven to be fact!" How can Hillary speak before Planned Parenthood when the most dangerous time for a Black child is in the womb?

Ask the Native Americans about American's  forked tongue! In our hour of grief and mourning at the transition of our beloved Muhammad Ali, let us take off our rose colored glasses and see clearly we must guard against being deceived and remain ever on the alert for we are in the midst of devils of the worse kind, who have no good intentions for us, yes, all of us in the 99%, whether white, black, brown or yellow, no matter what gender.

Elijah taugh us to trust no one but wear the armor of God and walk through the midst of our enemies as Jesus did until we reach the Upper Room of our Father's House!

Attalah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm Shabazz. "Oh Sister Queen, we love you in the name of Allah for keeping the light of your father, Malcolm X, a burning flame of freedom fire! We love you and honor you and all your siblings. We honor little Malcolm Shabazz as well for all he did of righteousness! And we honor and respect your dear Mother, Betty Shabazz, Queen Mother of the Black Nation in the wilderness of North America!"

Even on the day of this last rites to a true American hero, it's amazing how language can trick us, especially when we are ignorant of it. This is why I stress part of our condition is due to our psycholinguistic crisis. As my elder and associate, Dr. Nathan Hare explains, "We cannot claim to suffer amnesia because amnesia presumes we have forgotten something that I maintain the connection was so disconnected that it is beyond amnesia, i.e., we simply have no memory of our past history; not that it was totally erased but close to it." For example, when I listen to kora music, I am enraged to think this is the music we listened to ten thousand years ago, as Ancestor Ali Farka has told us when they asked him was he playing the Blues when he accompanied the Rolling Stones and B.B. King. He responded, "My people have been playing this music for ten thousand years, long before they found themselves captives of the American slave system (Ed Howard term) in the Mississippi Delta and created the music you call Blues." Surely you never imagined the Blues originated from African music of ten thousand years ago when we were in peace, when a man could lose his wallet and recover it years later; yes, Blues originated from a culture without jails and prisons--in you did wrong you were simply banished from the tribe, sometimes forever!

 Mrs. Muhammad Ali

All praise to Sister Muhammad for caring and loving Muhammad Ali!

When Muhammad Ali (may he rest in the grace of Allah) told the world he was the greatest, we thought he was ego tripping, but in fact he had been taught the most simple lesson in Islam, i,e, Alllahu Akbar or God is the Greatest! Along with: La-ee-laha-ee-la-illah, Muhammadan rasulullah, i.e., there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger.

So Ali was not ego tripping but expressing fundamental Islamic and Nation of Islam teachings, 101. Such teachings are not foreign to the Super Sunnis who suffer their dogmatic version of orthodox Islam, but just note that after four hundred years in the American slave system, we care nothing about orthodoxy, whether Islamic, Christian, Communist, Socialist or any other ideological or theological madness imposed on us by some foreign entity that is forever coming to us in their paternalistic manner to teach us the right way, again, no matter the theological or political  persuasion, as if we can't think for ourselves.

I am so thankful my Mother (Marian Murrill Jackmon) taught me, "Boy, use the mind God gave you!" Thank you, Mom! If we don't, we may surely end up in Jonestown feeding ourselves and our children poisoned Kool-Aid.

Imam Muhammad and Rev. Jim Jones. We cannot 
condemn the Imam for associating with Jim Jomes
when the entire Black leadership of San Francisco
supported him even after he was exposed as a devil
and departed for Jonestown, Guyana, South America.
Before Jim Jones arrived in Guyana, we interviewed
Prime Minister Forbes Burnham for Muhanmad Speaks
and Black Scholar Magazine, then soon discovered
he was working for the CIA to prevent Guyana from
becoming another Communist regime like Cuba. America
would accept a Black Power government before another
Communist regime in South America. The USA will use
puppets like Prime Minister Burnham to assassinate Dr.Walter Rodney,
one of our greatest minds for Pan African liberation. When he
allowed Jim Jones into the jungle, it only happened after a pay off
and compromise of Guyana officials just as he had done with the
Black leadership of San Francisco who are guilty with Jim Jones
in the mass murder of 900 of mostly North Americans Africans
who were brainwashed enough to drink poisoned Kool Aide and
give it to their children. Moreover, the Jonestown massacre is a
demonstration of the utter desperation of our condition in America
as I write.

Alas, imagine Muhammad Ali's so called Sunni teacher was Imam Warith Deen Muhammad, close friend of Rev. Jim Jones who murdered 900 mostly Black people in Jonestown Guyana, South America. What is more tragic is not only did Rev. Jim Jones hoodwink and bamboozle the poor masses but the entire Black leadership of San Francisco (no need to mention names, but we will say his personal physician was Dr. Carlton Goodlett, publisher of the San Francisco Sun Reporter Newspaper; Goodlett could have administered Rev. Jim Jones his personal poison to prevent the death of 900 poor, mostly North American Africans who fled American seeking solace in the jungles of South America). After all, Elijah taught us the Yacubian mythology that informed us Dr. Yakub used three workers in his bio-tech lab (such as those bio-tech labs in Emeryville Ca., a few blocks from where I live in Berkeley Calif), but we accept the fact they are cloning humans in the best of the Yacoubian myth-science manner. And who were his three main workers: the doctor, nurse and undertaker. Who was with Michael Jackson, his doctor! Who was with Prince, the doctor's son! And you want me to believe the teachings of HEM is poppycock? We suggest you examine your Super Sunni mythological notions that force you to kill people at the drop of a hat because you are suffering the addiction to so-called orthodox religiosity. 

Any religiosity is religiosity and we don't excuse ideology in the same manner of dogmatism that allows one to slip into darkness to the degree one will commit the worst acts of barbarity and savagery. So much for the crisis of spirituality and crisis of the intellectual who refuses to do what my Mother said, "You the mind God gave you." Alas, we are often so smart we outsmart ourselves, as my father told me. He said, "Boy, you should be a billionaire but you outsmarted yourself." And Mom added, "Boy, you don't need them Nigguhs, them Nigguhs need you! They just using your mind. You need to use the mind God gave you and leave them Nigguhs alone!" 

In truth, Mom was just like me or I was just like Mom: in her Real Estate business, she devoted her life to helping our people, in short, she was a Race Woman, just as my father was a Race Man, but Mom went further once she adopted the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science that afforded us not medicine cabinet in our house; we had to know the truth and the truth would set you free, according to Christian Science. Mom was thus a half century ahead of most Negroes in spirituality although today many have found their way closer to her spirituality when they come upon the teachings of Science of Mind, founded by the white man, Ernest Holmes. How amazing so-called Negroes can accept Science of Mind's theology that man is god but not Elijah Muhammad's. 

Surely there is some addiction to white supremacy here, and we must note most of the new-found followers of Science of Mind are the petty-bourgeoisie so-called Negroes who found the theology of a "Nigger" unacceptable but the white man saying essentially the same thing, quite acceptable. One of my elders, now ancestor, heard my partner (at the time) deliver the opening message at my concerts, he whispered to me, "Marvin, that girl teaching Islam, that's Islam," although my partner was convinced she was teaching Science of Mind religiosity. I allowed her to give the opening address only became I knew, as my elder said, she was teaching essentially Islam or quite simply, the truth! And how many versions of the truth exist? Either it's the truth or it's a lie!

And so we end today with the last rites of Muhammad Ali, and as ancestor Betty Shabazz taught us, "Find the good and praise it!" And so we do as she said, we find the good in Muhammad Ali and praise it, not ignoring his glaring contradictions that we all have upon examination!

What a joy it was to travel along the path with Muhammad Ali, to suffer his sufferings, even transcending his suffering when we experienced exile from America twice, then jail and prison. Yet, we are so thankful for the experience, for every minute of it: yes, exile, jail and prison was a learning experience and we are thankful to be a fellow traveler on the highway of the Most High, Worthy of Much Praise, Muhammad Ali. We are thankful for that brief moment we met at the home of Elijah Muhammad's house, even though we did not do the interview I came to do; even thought I did not meet Elijah Muhammad, but I met Clara Muhammad, first lady of the NOI, and I appreciate my interchange with Ali. He went into a room to converse with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and came out to tell me he was instructed to not do the interview for Ramparts Magazine. He said, "Brother, this is the man I'm willing to die for; so what he's says, I do!" 

Ali noted I had blood on my shirt from shaving and asked me if I needed some money since I had waited for him several days in Chicago while he was in Detroit. When I said, yes, he reaching in his pocked and gave me a few hundred dollars. I departed Chicago as high as I have ever been, after all, I met Ali in the house of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and exchanged greetings with the first lady of the Nation of Islam, a story I will tell about later in more detail since I was able to interview Sister Nisa Bey who lived in the house of Elijah off and on for ten years and gave me her story of ten years in the House of Elijah! All praise is due Allah for Muhammad Ali. Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali Ali!

--Marvin X (El Muhajir)

6/10/16

Oakland CA
Black Arts Movement Business District