Remembering Berkeley's Maudelle Shirek, 101 (1911-2013)

Queen Mother, Maudelle Shirek

Remembering Maudelle:

Maudelle Shirek (born June 18, 1911-died April 11, 2013) is a former Vice Mayor and eight term City Council member, Berkeley, California.  At the end of her tenure, she was one of the oldest elected officials in the State of California. In 2007, the Berkeley City Council renamed City Hall in her honor. She was my colleague, friend and mentor.

Maudelle and I served together on the Co-op Credit Union board of directors--I was the chair and she co-chair. 

In 2001, after the 9-11 attack on our country, we traveled to Washington DC together in support of Congresswoman Barbara Lee.  Barbara was the lone vote in the House of Representatives against America's invasion of Iraq--the authorization for use of military force that ultimately gave President George W. Bush seemingly unlimited war powers.  Because of that vote, Maudelle was worried about Barbara's personal safety due to the threats Barbara had received.  Maudelle asked me to travel to DC with her and I did.  We shared a hotel room together and I shall forget our first day after checking in the hotel the night before, how energetic Maudelle was--up early in the morning, exercised, had  taken her vitamins, showered and dressed before my feet even hit the floor. She was about 90 yrs young then. Amazing!!!  She was patient with me and my "jet lag". Finally, I got it together and off we went to Barbara's Congressional office.

Maudelle and I spent many hours sharing, debating and working on political, civic and community issues, concerns and problems.  Maudelle was indeed an unusual talent, brilliant, outspoken, persistent and consistent in all that she did.  She was proud of her roots, her family and the lessons that life had taught her.  Maudelle was born in Jefferson, Arkansas and grew up on a farm, the granddaughter of slaves.  She moved to Berkeley in the 1940s.

Maudelle did not wait to be asked, she just saw a need and got busy.  I was fortunate, along with Barbara Lee, Ron Dellums, Gus Newport and many others to be counted as a member of her family.  Maudelle did not hesitate to offer her support and love, but also did not hesitate to offer constructive criticism. She always took an active interest in the seniors and was hands-on in the preparation of the meals at the local senior center just down the block from where I live. She was a nutrition and health advocate and practiced what she preached. Her energy, commitment and dedication to her fellow human beings was limitless.  I will miss her and I extend my sympathies to her family and friends.  May she rest in peace. 

Carole

Carole Davis Kennerly, MSW/LCSW 

Former Vice Mayor, Berkeley, Ca.

Director, Coop Federal Credit Union (retired)

carolekennerly@sbcglobal.net

510-486-0551

cell- 510-812-6299

 "Learn the lessons from the past; accept the gifts of the present and act on them now. 

How to Recover from America's Addiction to Selective Suffering

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

"I want Marvin X off campus (Fresno State University) by any means necessary."--Gov. Ronald Reagan, 1969

America and the West's addiction to selective suffering is full blown. Recovery from such selective suffering will involve long term treatment in a  confined situation, perhaps the entire nation will require the 13 step program I outlined in my book How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy. 

America's selective suffering involves the grand feature of addiction: denial! Rather than admit her sins, her history of slavery and genocide, she grovels in the grandiose fantasy of American Exceptionalism, the myth   that she is God's chosen people to dominate the world. Just as this chosen people myth will ultimately consume the nation of Israel, it will be the same end for America that closely imitates her Zionist allies. 

Of course, selective suffering is the notion that James Baldwin negated in his statement, "The murder of my child will not make your child safe." How often does America and the West sing "Silent Night" while it murder children, women and men around the world, in such places as Iraq, occupied Palestine, Afghanistan, Yemen,

Somalia and other parts of Africa. These murders of innocents is mostly ignored in the grand scheme of combating terrorism. But who is the world's greatest terrorist? What nation has 700 military bases around the world to dominate the natural resources of other nations under the rubric of global free trade capitalism?

The free trade involves virtual slavery and the theft of the natural resources of nations. Who is the number one gun merchant of the world? America!

How hypocritical can America be to suggest gun control in the US? There shall be no gun control is a society founded on violence. I'm not speaking of the revolutionary violence for independence, but the raw genocide of the slave trade and the almost total elimination of the indigenous Native Americans. Does America have any intention to give reparations to the descendants of Africans who suffered the slave system? Will she 

grant true national sovereignty to the indigenous people? Will she grant citizenship to the 30 million descendants of America now called Mexicans?

Don't count on it anytime soon, for her concern is the pursuit of Exceptionalism which means the continued exploitation of the world, especially the notion that she is entitled to 25% of the world's energy while she is only 4% of the world's population. 

This collective insanity (see my In the Crazy House Called America) will continue with no abatement in sight. 

Any time America is attacked by foreign or domestic enemies, or when her children commit mass murder, her response is total shock and dismay. Yet she sings "Silent Night" while children in the hoods of America are murdered each night by themselves or the Gestapo police who are an occupying army in the hood, giving America its false sense of security that all is well, that violence in the hood shall never spill over into the suburbs and white communities. Imagine if 700,000 white boys were stopped and frisked in America. White people would be in enraged, ready for revolution, but they are like deaf mutes while minorities, soon to become majorities, suffer harassment under the color of law.

We cannot imagine the endgame for America, for its abdominal sins done, sadly, in the name of God and so called Christianity, a Christianity that has nothing to do with the teachings of the man called Jesus Christ. Can we imagine Jesus Christ enslaving people, lynching people, cutting off the hands of people if they learned how to read? Can we imagine Jesus Christ dropping an atomic bomb on people, using depleted uranium to murder people in wars for oil? As Rev. James Cone told Bill Moyers, America will not come out of her selective suffering, her addiction to white supremacy, her delusional idea that she is exceptional, until she comes to understand the relationship between the cross and the lynching tree, until she understands that strange fruit Billie Holiday told us about.

--Marvin X

4/17/13  

Merritt College and the Birth of the West Coast Black Consciousness/liberation Movement

We can say between the Black Panther Party and the West coast Black Arts Movement that also came out of Merritt, we shook up the world! Yes, the Black Panthers came out of Merritt, the Black Arts

Movement (west coast) came out of Merritt and Black studies came out of Merritt. No wonder the college was moved from the Hood to the hills.

Attorney Donald Warden (aka Khalid Abdullah Tariq al Mansour),

Chairman of the Afro-American Association centered at Merritt College. 

The AAA developed from a group of brothers attending UC Berkeley's Bolt Law School.

Merritt College was the hotbed of Black Nationalism, initiated by Donald

Warden's Afro-American Association that deeply influenced all the

above. When Eldridge Cleaver was released from prison, 1966, he

and I established the Black House, a political/cultural center in San

Francisco that was briefly the headquarters of the Black Arts

Movement and later the Sf headquarters of the Black Panther Party.

Eldridge Cleaver and Marvin X, circa 1977

When Eldridge Cleaver was released from prison, 1966, he and Marvin X established the Black House, a political/cultural center in San Francisco that was briefly the headquarters of the Black Arts

Movement and later the Sf headquarters of the Black Panther Party.

Amiri Baraka and Marvin X worked bi-coastal to establish the Black Arts Movement.

Baraka established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/school in Harlem. Marvin X and 

playwright Ed Bullins established Black Arts West Theatre in the Fillmore, 1966, and

with Eldridge Cleaver, established the Black House in San Francisco, 1967. Baraka

came West to work at San Francisco State University on the BSU's Communications Project.

Marvin arrived in Harlem, 1968, to work at the New Lafayette Theatre. His BAM colleagues

included Askia Toure, Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Barbara Ann Teer, Larry Neal,

Nikki Giovanni, Mae Jackson, the Last Poets, Milford Graves and Sun Ra.

As per the Black Arts Movement literature, two key journals came out of Merritt, Soulbook magazine writers were at Merritt, including Bobby Seale, Ken Freeman, Carol

Freeman, Ernest Allen and Marvin X. Richard Thorne wrote in Negro

Digest, Adam David Miller had the Aldridge Players West and taught

at Merritt. Poet Sarah Webster Fabio taught Black Studies at

Merritt. The brothers who founded Black Dialogue Magazine (Abdul

Sabry, Aubrey LaBrie and Marvin X) had transferred to San Francisco

State University from Merritt.  The Journal of Black Poetry evolved from

Black Dialogue. 

The Black Panther Party was critical in the establishment of Black Studies at Merritt College, but San FranciscoState University was first to establish Black Studies on a major college campus, suffering an eight month violent strike to do so!

A final note, Maulana Ron Karenga was a member of the Afro-American Association centered at Merritt College. He became the Los Angeles representativeof the AAA. We have been informed he got the concept of Kwanza from Oakland's AAA, according to AAA co-founder Ed Howard. 

Ed Howard

Marvin,

You bring back fond memories.

Too bad Merritt has changed “Black Studies” to “African-American Studies” (closer to Melville Herskovits’s “Afroamerican Studies” (1957), or even “African Studies” (1947). I seem to remember reading where Howard even had something called “Negro Studies” before then (see the groundbreaking article on Negro Colleges by Harvard professors, Reisman and Jencks, in the Harvard Educational Review (circa 1966/1967). I know they had a master’s degree in “African Affairs” (including three African languages) when I went to teach there in 1961. Two years earlier I had been a typist for the Journal of Asian Studies, housed at Northwester, Melville Herskovits’s haunt.  My wife and I had just been sharing an apartment with a couple from Lincoln University, the man a postman, and anytime he cornered me alone he was marveling about something Melville Herskovits had said when he was a visiting professor at Lincoln.

I don’t know what we would call the course I had in “Negro History” (Carter G. Woodson’s textbook) in 1948 at Tousssaint L’Ouversture High -- then a part of the “Slick Separate Schools of Creek County” (Oklahoma). Or the course in “Race Relations” at the University of Chicago in 1956. Where I was the only black student when a  white professor, an E. Franklin Frazier classmate, almost daily spoke of “Bourgeoisie Noir” (to be translated with acclaim in America the following year as “Black Bourgeoisie.)”  

Indeed, I had what we might call independent study in blackness the first grade at Toussaint l’Ouverture elementary school (where each morning our daily devotion would be devoted to singing Negro songs and reciting Negro poetry and Miss Ruff’s touting of Nat Turner and John Brown. Miss Ruff had told us we would pass from 1^st to 2^nd once we had completed the textbook (Dick and Jane or Tom and Spot, don’t recall just which). However, she would have us recite the two pages she presumed we had gone home and learned the night before, let alone to pace herself like psychotherapists traditionally leave ten minutes to take care of office chores and go to the restroom in the “hour” devoted to a session (The 50 Minute Hour).

One day Miss Ruff was making costumes for the eighth grade play and had two 8^th grade students handling our daily reading recitations. They being female, I chose the opportunity to show off and kept right on reading and reading. Finally one called out to the teacher: “Miss Ruff, how many pages do they read?”  Not looking up she replied: “As much as they can.” I continued through the book. However, my sister was in the second grade, having been kept back a year due to a ringworm epidemic that had swept our community. So Miss Ruff held me in the first grade but gave me the run of the big white book cabinet pretty much all day, where I would read each as I wished independently and soon found delight in stories and pictures of little black children in books that had been published by a place in Okemah, Oklahoma (a so-called “Sundown Town” –  where the sign read: “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on you here”, or “Nigger, read and run; if you can’t read, run anyway.)”  

I would never see copies of those books until 1965, in a SNCC “Freedom School” in the basement of a predominantly white Unitarian Church in Washington D.C. And I have never seen a copy of them since.

The struggle continues.

Nathan