Happy 80th Birthday, Dr. Nathan Hare, Father of Black Studies

Happy 80th Birthday Dr. Nathan Hare

Geoffery's Club
410 14th St., Oakland
Saturday, April 13, 2013
3-5pm

PROGRAM

MUSICAL INTERLUDE    TARIKA LEWIS, EARL DAVIS

WELCOME     DR. AYODELE NZINGA, PhD

LIBATIONS    MUTIMA IMANI

HAPPY BIRTHDAY    MECHELLE LACHAUX

OPEN MIKE: WORDS OF PRAISE (THREE MINUTE MAX)

A CONVERSATION: DR. NATHAN HARE AND MARVIN X

Q and A

The End

Thanks:

Geoffery Pete,  Paul Cobb, Oakland Post; Marvin X, Amira Jackmon, Esq., Archives Project; Dr. Mona Scott, Black Repertory Group Theatre, West Oakland Renaissance Committee/Elders Council, Dr. Ayodele Nzinga, Lower Bottom Playaz, Geoffery Grier, SF Recovery Theatre, Wanda Sabir, SF Bayview

For information: 510-200-4164

Dr. Hare on the Hare Papers
Marvin,

Looks great so far as it went. What you have in those boxes, as you know, is not the whole or the best of what’s in the apartment, let alone the entire stash.

FYI. I have been written about with Martin Luther King and Floyd McKissick in the official FBI Newsletter, May 23, 1967,  at the end of co-leading the campus uprising at Howard toward a black university relevant to the black community and its needs in the face of an announcement in 1966 to make it “Sixty Percent White by 1970) anticipating the riots that came that summer.  

I have published in Newsweek (debating RoyWilkins, NAACP), Massachusetts Review, the London times, Social Forces, Social Education, Saturday Review, Saturday Evening Post, U. S. News and World Report, Esquire’s “Thirteen Top Black Scholars.” Negro History Bulletin, Journal of Negro Education, Graduate Journal, Liberal Education, ad infinitum, the periodical Black Male/Female Relationships, The Black Think Tank.

Julia was named by the Junior Chamber of Commerce in 1966 as the “Outstanding Young Educator” (35 and under) for every grade level for the whole of the District of Columbia’ public school system.  She also was included in Ebony’s “150 Most Influential African-Americans” circa 2008. Multiple times “Ten Most Influential African-Americans in the Bay Area” from City Flight Magazine. She and John Hope Franklin are among those who have been conducted into Tulsa’s Booker T. Washington Hall of Fame. Currently integrated but still rated as one of the top high schools in the country. Julia grew up playing piano and organ for the Mt. zion Baptist Church, which was bombed from the air, the only instance in American history. She also was university organist while still a student. She was also voted the Best Girl Dancer and Most Popular Girl at Langston.

I have won distinguished awards, including the highest given , lifetime achievement, from the National Association of Black Sociologists, and National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame, black psychologists, National Council for Black Studies (twice),  etc.

I was on the Steering Committee of the First and Third National Black Power Conferences. (Newark and Philadelphia, respectively). Also The First National Black United Front founded by a former student, Stokely Carmichael.

I was a distinguished visiting scholar at Stanford on the Sixties, Julia and I have been Distinguished Visiting Scholars at the University of Pennsylvania, Stillman (Alabama) and Lane (Tennesee).

I have keynoted the Fourth National Conference of Afroamerican Writers as well as the National Conference of Black studies. I was on the North America Zonal Committee of the Second  World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), held in Lagos. I was an invited by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) as an observer at the First World Festival of Arts and Culture (Algiers).

I was a professional boxer in D.C. and Maryland (featured on the cover of Jet, in Ebony, Sepia, NET (National Educational Television). Made for TV Movie “Color Us Black).”

Julia aspired to be an actor later in life and had among her credits a  bit part with Jackie Gleason in “Mr. Billion. She was or is a member of SAG, AFTRA, and

Was for three years Director of Community Affairs for KSFO radio (Cowboy Gene Autry’ station) for ten years. Was on the air in a morning drive in dialogue with Don Sherwood. She was also a Talk Show host for three years at KGO Radio, the ABC Station.

I did two Ph.D. theses.  My master’s thesis, ”A Study of the Professional Boxer” (1957) anticipated sports sociology and sports psychology. Translated in several languages and included in several anthologies, including Abraham Chapman’s, Mentor Book, “New Black Voices” (featured on the cover).

We lived through segregation in the South until the 1960s. I served in the U.S. Army, though a resister in my way before it was popular. The only person I know who got drafted and got the orders canceled. Also, when I saw proof of service in the early 1980s the Army had no record of ever discharging me. I achieved Sharpshooter ranking without completing the shooting involved.

We will come across documentation of such as the above in the final gathering of the archives.

For your personal information, be advised that I fully intend to complete the autobiography myself (hence “auto”) before I croak. For I have miles to go before I sleep, despite the fact that there are several things that might be good enough to take me out.  One month from now, on Paul Robeson’s birthday, I will be 80.  If I manage to finish the autobiography, you would then be encouraged to do a biography, as materials and notes would be left over from the autobiography, aside from all the gossip, lies and scuttlebutt you might gather as well.

Nathan

Mumia Abu Jamal, Kim IL Sung and the Nation of Islam

MUMIA ABU JAMAL, KIM IL SUNG & THE NATION OF ISLAM

[extract from Mumia's book We Want Freedom]


COMPETITON ON THE CORNER

By Mumia Abu-Jamal

The 3rd Avenue El in the Bronx was a major thoroughfare in the borough, and as such was a prime site for one trying to sell The Black Panther.

I had recently been assigned to the Bronx office and in an attempt to sell my 50 copies, I chose a stop on the line where the foot traffic would be quite heavy, as people descended from the elevated train ride. At roughly the same time, another young Black man elected to stop at the busy corner with the intention of selling his wares.

His wares were essentially the same as mine—newspapers. There, however, the similarity ended, for it was clear from his product that competition was inevitable.

The young man wore a dark-green iridescent suit and a brightly colored bow tie. His hair was cut close to his scalp in the "hustler" style, with a thin part cut in, his face shaved hairless. He carried with him a multi-colored plastic shopping bag that appeared to be filled with copies of Muhammad Speaks.

As I surveyed his wares, he was surveying mine. We looked at each other and understood that neither would relinquish the corner to the other.

And so, we began selling in earnest.

Shouts of "Help Us Free Huey!" mingled with "Salaam Aliekum, brother!" as we struggled to sell our product.

"Yo, brother! Find out what’s happenin’ that the white power structure ain’t gonna tell ya! Check out The Black Panther—only a quarter!"

"Salaam Aliekum, Sister! Come on back to your own! Read Muhammad Speaks! Twenty-five cents!"

For nearly an hour the sales continued, fed and famished by the flow of passerby debarking from the trains hissing to a stop overhead. After a while, we got into a conversation:

"Brother, you got to get with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and stop following those devils like Marx and Lenin and ’em."

"Well, bro’—you should get with the Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, and the Black Panther Party."

"You should follow a Black man, brother, not some Jews like Marx and Lenin!"

"We revolutionaries, brother, and we study about revolutionaries from around the world. We don’t care what race they is."

"I can see that, brother," glancing at a copy of The Black Panther, pointing to a cover picture of an Asian, full-haired man. "Who is that, brother?"

"That’s Kim Il-Sung, the leader of North Korea, and a revolutionary."

"You see what I’m saying, brother? Here you go talking ‘bout another guy! He ain’t got nothin’ to say to Black people, brother!"

"Well, if that’s so, brother, why he in yo paper Muhammad Speaks?"

"What you talkin’ bout, brother?" he asked, seemingly stunned by the question.

I read and studied his paper quite regularly, for its layout, news, and commentary, but I doubted if he ever read any of ours. This seemed only logical for someone assigned to the East Coast Ministry of Information office, and I remembered reading this week’s issue of Muhammad Speaks.

"Check it out, brother, in yo international news section."

In disbelief, he turned the pages until, sure enough, an article appeared bearing a photo of Kim Il-Sung. He looked at it, and then turned to me, smiling.

"Yes sir, brother. Yessir. Um-humm."

"And what we learned from him was the idea of Juche, a Korean word that means self-reliance!"

Eldridge Cleaver and the New Left in North Korea

When the New Left Shilled for North Korea

March 8, 2013 By Ron Radosh Comments (20)

Reprinted from PJMedia.

The DPRK is beautiful, Clean, honest, free, and totally revolutionary. It is a new civilization called Socialism. … A new potent force is beginning to emerge in the Third World — The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea under the leadership of Comrade Kim Il-Sung [who is] refocusing the perspective of the Revolutionary Peoples of the Whole World who are not already liberated, powerful and secure. This is a historic development and the revolutionary peoples … must take heed of it.
 

– Eldridge Cleaver diary entry, 1970.

When North Korea was still being led by its original founder, Kim Il-Sung, the visitors from the United States to the horrendous Communist regime were not the likes of Dennis Rodman. Today, the founder’s grandson, Kim Jong-Un,  has inherited the mantle of leadership, thereby carrying on the dynasty that rules in the name of Marxism-Leninism, as modified by the founder’s philosophy of juche, or self-reliance, autonomy, and independence.

How far the North Korean Communists have fallen. Back in the day of the old fellow-travelers’ tours to the various communist paradises, the regimes had their praises sung by the likes of the African-American baritone Paul Robeson, who regularly went to the USSR and told the world how great Comrade Stalin was and how the Soviet Union had the only real democracy on Earth. At least Robeson was an All-American football quarterback and the most well-known black American actor and singer in the 1930s and 40s. He also received a lawdegree at Columbia University. That a man so intelligent could function as a dupe for Stalin was far more worrisome than seeing Rodman do the same today. No one would call Rodman intelligent. He is both a useful idiot as well as a real one; Robeson only filled the first category.

Bruce Bawer hits it squarely on the head when he notes that Rodman gives an impression of “utter foolishness and ignorance,” so much so that Bawer wonders if he ever has read any book at all. Bawer also points out that the attention given his view of North Korea is an indication of how the modern cult of celebrity “has taken root even in the presidential palace in Pyongyang.” And how many of our fellow countrymen might be influenced by the hosannas to both the late Hugo Chavez and the soon to be late Fidel Castro by showbiz stars like Sean Penn, Danny Glover, Tim Robbins, Harry Belafonte, and of course, Oliver Stone. The list goes on.

So let us turn to the reign of the founder of the hermit kingdom, Kim Il-Sung, who one thinks would never have welcomed Dennis Rodman to his lair. That Rodman is welcome there today is the result of Kim wanting a goodeducation for his children and grandchildren, with the result that the current ruler learned to love basketball and Rodman while a student in one of the most elite schools in Switzerland. When a Red ruler sends his kids for a good education out of the homeland, one never knows what might be the result.

We now know, thanks to the enterprising scholarship of a young M.A. student at The College at Brockport, Benjamin R. Young, about the hitherto unknown ties of the American New Left with Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea, which it seems these major New Left activists hoped to have replace both the Soviet Union and Communist China as the model for socialism in their own day and age.

Now, Young’s findings and documents are online for all to see at the website of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and its division, the Cold War International History Project.

Young writes:

From the autumn of 1969 to the winter of 1971, the Panthers identified Kim Il Sung’s JucheIdea, rather than the teachings of Mao Zedong, as the most effective application of Marxism-Leninism. The Panthers utilized the slipperiness of Juche as a way to evade the Chinese and Soviet lines of Marxism-Leninism — much in the same way, some argue, the North Koreans used Juche.

So infatuated was Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party’s minister of information, that he sent his wife Kathleen to North Korea when she was pregnant so that she could receive “the proper rest and medical care necessary at the time.” She gave birth to their daughter on July 31, 1970, in Pyongyang, which fortunately means that she can never be president of the United States. They named the baby Juju Younghi, to make her name sound Korean. Later, Cleaver claimed that in North Korea she got “the most excellent and thorough medical attention in my life,” as well as “the most pleasant and comfortable living conditions for myself and my family.”

And you thought Cuba was the favorite place for health care among New Leftists — I anxiously await a Michael Moore film about how wonderful North Korea is.

The delusionary view of North Korea was also stated by Panther leader Elaine Brown, who wrote that North Korean farmers “live at a much higher standard than the average person in the United States who would be involved in farming work, or even a worker.” The average North Korean had good health care, medical facilities, a housing and clothing allotment, and free education through college.

As for South Korea, the Panthers called it an oppressive puppet regime of the United States, led by a “running dog of U.S. imperialism” in a country in which the people lived in poverty and near starvation. “In North Korea,” she wrote, “ … the people are getting everything they need, while … in the South, people who speak the same language are starving.”

I was not unaware of the fascination of the New Left with North Korea. Those of you who have read my memoir, Commies, A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, might recall a few pages on the left-wing journalist Robert Scheer, who now edits his own webzine (Truthdig.com).

In the summer of 1970 on a trip to San Francisco, I went to see Scheer, who was then living in the Red Family Commune and working at its kindergarten: the Blue Fairyland. During the visit, I taped Scheer for a weekly radio program that my friend Louis Menashe and I had on New York’s WBAI, the flagship station of the leftist and counter-culture Pacifica radio network. I wanted to talk to him about the state of the Left, the nature of the radical movement, and his work in journalism.

All Scheer agreed to talk about, however, was his recent visit to North Korea, and his view of its leader, Kim-Il Sung.

For two hours, Scheer regaled me about the nature of the paradise North Korea had created under the great Kim, and how juche was the ideology necessary for the building of socialism. He had successfully one-upped his other American comrades, who were still touting Fidel Castro and Cuba as the homeland for revolution.

Much to my surprise, though, I did learn from the newly released documents just how much Scheer was involved with North Korea.

Living in California, Scheer — like other New Leftists in the Bay Area — was drawn to the communist Black Panther Party and its volatile leader, the late Eldridge Cleaver. The movement’s newspaper, The Black Panther, always portrayed North Korea as an “earthly paradise,” and viewed it as the first nation “to bring the U.S. imperialists trembling to their knees.” They were the very first group, as Benjamin Young points out, to make a formal connection with North Korea — called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

When Eldridge Cleaver was facing arrest, he eventually fled to the isolated communist state and was given sanctuary there by Kim Il-Sung.

Scheer visited Cleaver in North Korea, and in a documentary film about Cleaver, is shown talking to the Black Panther Party leader about the paradise they were privileged to be in. In 1970, Cleaver invited Scheer to an “anti-imperialist” conference for journalists to be held in Pyongyang. Writing to the DPRK authorities, Cleaver told them: “I regard him as a Comrade.” He continued: “It would be advantageous to the struggle against fascism and imperialism, particularly U.S. imperialism, for him to visit … and to write about what he sees and learns and thinks.”

To put it bluntly, Cleaver told Kim Il-Sung’s cadre that Scheer could be depended upon to say how wonderful North Korea was, and to spread their propaganda line once he returned home. My interview with Scheer — which even the left-wing Pacifica network thought too strange and sectarian to broadcast — proved that Cleaver’s promise was fulfilled.

Cleaver informed the DPRK leaders that Scheer “is a very influential voice for the New Left Movement inside the U.S.,” whose “writings are widely known and read inside the U.S. and in England and Europe.” Here, he stressed Scheer’s previous writings after his return from South Vietnam in 1965 and 1966. He was, he noted, “selected as the spokesman for the anti-war forces in California” and was running for Congress in a “Progressive campaign.”

There was one problem Cleaver felt he had to note: Scheer was then not opposed to Israel. He hoped, however, that he would be capable of “articulating a Progressive political position on the question of Palestine.”

To the Bay Area left, North Korea was more of a model for the revolution they sought and for the path to destroying the American imperialist hegemon than Soviet Russia or Mao’s China. Using the papers of Eldridge Cleaver, which include memos, letters, and diaries, the fascination of Cleaver and his followers with Kim Il-Sung’s regime can be fleshed out as never before. The regime, Cleaver wrote after going to North Korea in 1969 and 1970, was “a beacon in the vanguard of the struggling masses of the world.”

Cleaver hoped to adopt Kim’s theory of juche as a tool for the revolution he hoped to lead in the United States. He wrote:

The revolutionary forces inside the United States must be supported by the revolutionary peoples of the whole world because the people outside of the United States will slice the tentacles of the hideous octopus of U.S. oppression. The revolutionaries inside the United States will cut out its imperialist heart and give the decisive death blow to U.S. fascism and imperialism. … Comrade Kim Il Sung is the most relevant strategist in the struggle against U.S. fascism and imperialism in the world today and he has put the correct tactical line for the universal destruction of fascism and imperialism in our time.

While the people in North Korea are suffering under the greatest hardship, and are near starvation — which today is well-known — Cleaver believed that the people “have no worries about food, clothing, lodging, education, medicine” and work to their “heart’s content leading a happy life.”

To herald North Korea to the wider public, Cleaver sponsored two different conferences for journalists. In the call to one of them, the sponsors who would attend included a writer for the major American radical magazineRamparts, of which Scheer had been an editor; two members of the radical film collective Newsreel (including one woman who was a classmate of mine at the left-wing high school I attended in New York City); and Elaine Brown of the Black Panther Party.

The documents make clear that the American New Left — like its predecessors in the old Communist Party, U.S.A. — were not indigenous American radicals seeking to build their own movement in response to the needs of the American people, which is what they claimed at the time. Rather, they too were seeking the leadership and inspiration from foreign revolutionary leaders whose forces had already taken control of other nations, and had begun to create totalitarian monstrosities that often exceeded that created in Russia by Lenin, Stalin, and their successors.

Like the radicals of yesteryear, the New Left issued false positive reports about the nature of life in the revolutionary country of North Korea, using their own outlets to spread the propaganda of Kim Il-Sung’s Communist country. And the North Koreans not only got the New Left to spread their propaganda abroad, it is suspected that they sought, as Young’s article suggests, “to reach, develop, penetrate, and influence dissident groups in the United States” by placing agents in the U.S. and Canada who used phony South Korean and Japanese identities.

In addition, reading through Eldridge Cleaver’s fascinating notes and diary entries, one has new evidence about how his time in North Korea effectively, if we can use a 1950s term, brainwashed him. Cleaver came to believe that Kim Il-Sung was the leader of the world revolution and that the New Left had to take orders from him. There are many entries about how Comrade Kim taught him to pick up the gun against oppressors, and fight to the end until victory. One fascinating diary entry from 1969 starts with a discussion of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg:

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for giving Soviet Union atomic bomb secrets of imperialist U.S.A. In the name of the blood of the Rosenbergs, in the name of the blood of the Vietnamese people, in the name of humanity, I demand that the Soviet Union use its hydrogen bombs to force the United States out of Vietnam. Now is the time, while the American people are sick and tired of the War. If Stalin were in control of the Soviet Union he would do it. If there were Marxist-Leninists in the Soviet Union they would do it.

The H-bombs, he added, belonged not to the U.S. but “to the International Proletariat.”

In an official statement addressed to “Esteemed Mr. Eldridge Cleaver and Madame” and “Esteemed Mr. Robert Scheer,” an unnamed North Korean official — most likely Kim Il-Sung himself — wrote to his “Comrades,” greeting the “Anti-Imperialist Delegation of the American People.” The statement thanked them for their solidarity “in the struggle against U.S. imperialism, the common enemy.” The American system, it continued, was “headed by war-maniac Nixon” and was “running amuck to find a way out of their acute crisis” by waging a war “for aggression and war externally,” and carrying out “plunder and repression of the people internally.”

It ended with a toast “to the health of Eldridge Cleaver and his wife” and “to the health of Mr. Robert Scheer.”

No wonder they received such a toast. Cleaver and Scheer came back filled with enthusiasm, and dedicated to spreading North Korea propaganda back home in the United States. As a lengthy statement says, perhaps written by either of the two:

It will be with the greatest joy that we will tell the American people of the glorious victories of your socialist revolution, of the miraculous economic construction that has built a paradise … In the capitalist United States, technology is highly advanced, but serves only to exploit and murder people … But in [North] Korea we have seen and felt how socialist technology works for the liberation of people.

The statement ends quoting the “brilliant, iron-willed commander, Marshal Kim Il Sung,” who told them that his country was not afraid of war, should the imperialists unleash it against them.

Today, the New York Times reports that Korean officials have said:

Now that the U.S. is set to light a fuse for a nuclear war, the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK will exercise the right to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors and to defend the supreme interests of the country.

With Kim Jong-Un threatening a nuclear attack against the United States if the new UN sanctions against North Korea are put into effect, and with his announcement that his regime will abrogate the 1953 truce with South Korea, the grandson is following in his ancestor’s footsteps.

What new-generation Robert Scheer and Eldridge Cleaver will follow their example and organize a new trip to defend the socialist paradise against American imperialism?

Will Michael Moore rush to North Korea to make a new film telling the truth about their wonderful medical care?

Or will even Dennis Rodman prove he knows how to read, look over Eldridge Cleaver’s diary entries and letters, and realize he is providing the evil regime with a post-modern version of Cleaver’s earlier homage?

What really would be wonderful: if, at Truthdig.com Mr. Scheer would own up to his embarrassing past and apologize publicly for his foolish early years of revolutionary bravado. I look forward to such an article.