So Much Trouble in the World - BOB MARLEY

Pig Murderer of Oscar Grant Will be Released Sunday, Rally City Hall 5pm

WE HAVE A DATE!!!!! RALLY ON THIS SUNDAY JUNE 12th!!! Mehserle the murderer will be released from jail on Sunday, June 12th. We will meet at the Fruitvale BART station at 3 PM, rally and then march to 14th & Broadway for arrival at approximately 5 PM. SPREAD THE WORD!!!!!! COME OUT AND HAVE YOUR VOICE HEARD! STAND UP FOR THE PEOPLE AND SAY NO TO KILLER COPS!!!!!!

Justice in Amerikkka:Kill African, 2 Years, Kill Dog, 4 Years


And so it is, Amerikkka is alive and well. True to the die hard battery. The Africans did not take it well, not well at all, the sentence given to the BART officer who murdered Oscar Grant. No one, most of all the murderer, accepts the lie the police mistook his gun for his Tazer. It is a great legal defense, after all, it worked.

The people of Oakland were mortified, traumatized and beyond belief that they had been tricked into believing justice was the American way. We were hoodwinked and bamboozled by the judge with a long train of tricknology. We understand he was the judge in the Ramparts case of LA police committing a multiplicity of crimes under the color of law, shakedown, false evidence, false confession, robbery, dope dealing, murder, money laundering. The usual. This is the American way, get over it. Get real! Stop crying crocodile tears! Denzil Dowell, Bobby Hutton, Tyrone Guyten, Melvin Black, Oscar Grant, all martyr s caught in the American way. Young people slaughtered by the police. And then we slaughter our own kind. Which is worse, them killing us or us killing us?
No one shall respect you when you don't respect yourself! You shoot each down like dogs. You have lost the human touch. You need a healing. Someone must, in the name of love, lay hands on you. You are a danger to yourself and others, thus fit for the mental ward.

You are angry with the police for killing Oscar Grant, but you give yourselves a pass when it comes to brother killing brother. No march, no rally.

Today at Academy of da Corner, I used the example of the Gay and Lesbian community in San Francisco. As you head down Market Street to the Castro District, the gay/lesbian flag is flying on the light posts. The closer you get to the Castro the bigger the flag. So you understand you are in an environment of people who have taken authority over their lives. You cannot come into their community calling the punks, dykes, bull daggers, etc. Such verbal abuse is a hate crime, a terrorist threat. You can be arrested by, yes, a gay and/or lesbian police officer.

On the other hand, there is no Red, Black and Green flying in the hood. No sign of national consciousness, that a people are alive to themselves, their soul, spirit. We must fly the national to let all people know we are a community and we shall allow no bullshit in the hood. I gave the example of when you go to Santa Rita County Jail, the inmates demand you take a shower before you hit the bunk, even though you may be exhausted from 24 to 48 hours on concrete benches and floors from holding cell to holding cell.

But you washed yo ass! the brothers demanded it. In the hood we must do the same thing, we demand unity, we demand honesty, we demand justice in relations with each other. We must not disrespect brothers and sisters. We must secure our community. The police have not and cannot keep the peace, so we must take it upon ourselves to secure our communities. We cannot have senior citizens robbed at the bus stop by teen age girls or boys. We love our children but they must think a better way out of their economic desperation.

The police shall continue in their iniquity. They have no desire to be peace makers, they are too busy being peace breakers.

Maybe we can break them, in fact, we should disrupt the entire economic and political life of Oakland, let's make the downtown workers flee the black hoard as they did the day of the verdict in the Oscar Grant trial. Let them flee for their lives. Shall we rally everyday for justice, most of all, political justice, and especially economic justice.

Walking by Oakland City Hall tonight, we happened upon a press conference with Jean Quan, soon to be announced Mayor of Oakland. We heard her tell of the measure that she wrote in support of money for the police. The police consume 75% of the City budget. Yet there is no peace in the hood. High unemployment, low educational skills. We shouted to the the mayor-elect, "What about jobs." She mumbled some political gibberish.

Yet the president tells the world they are willing to offer schooling, jobs and housing to terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere if they lay down their arms and pledge alliance to the constitution of their lands. But you cannot offer schooling, jobs and housing to the boys and girls in the hoods of America to stop the killing and general mayhem?

If we offer them nothing and they persist is criminal activity, we shall send the slave catchers (police) to jail them, wherein they are worth $50,000.00 per inmate per year. Imagine, the California Correctional Officers Union is the most powerful union in the state. The officers tell the niggers, "Keep coming back. I got me a yacht , now I need one for my son, so keep coming back to jail and prison."

Mayor to be Jean Quan, we call upon you as your first order of business to find employment for the perennially unemployed, that you offer a general amnesty to all inmates in the City jail and Alameda County Jail. This may assuage some of the trauma and unresolved grief in the people of Oakland.

At the Rally of Friday after the sentencing of the officer, we heard expressions of deep pain and sorrow. Many said they were sick to the stomach. Many seemed shocked beyond belief that America is still a racist pig. Just as they had no mercy on Oscar Grant, they shall have none for President Obama but shall continue to crucify him for being a black man in the white house.

They shall obstruct him at every turn, making mockery of his policies. Their entire agenda is to stop him in 2012. Along they way, we shall hear their mantra NO, NO, No, No, no. No, nigger no, no nigger no. So what part you don't understand, the no or the nigger?
--Marvin X
11/8/10

WE HAVE A DATE!!!!! RALLY ON THIS SUNDAY JUNE 12th!!!
Mehserle the murderer will be released from jail on Sunday, June 12th. We will meet at the Fruitvale BART station at 3 PM, rally and then march to 14th & Broadway for arrival at approximately 5 PM. SPREAD THE WORD!!!!!! COME OUT AND HAVE YOUR VOICE HEARD! STAND UP FOR THE PEOPLE AND SAY NO TO KILLER COPS!!!!!!

The Art of Elizabeth Catlett Mora

Elizabeth Cattlett Mora,
Queen Mother of the
Black Arts Movement
















Sharecropper











Queen Mother Elizabeth Cattlett Mora gave me refuge
in Mexico City during my second exile as a resister to
the Vietnam war, 1969. She and her husband, Poncho (RIP)
were witnesses at my civil wedding to Barbara Hall, mother of my daughters Nefertiti and Amira. When I walked into her house,
she was working on this piece honoring the Black Panther Party. After leaving Mexico City, I did not see her again until over thirty years later when she came with Sonia Sanchez to my book party at Amiri Baraka's house in Newark, NJ.
--Marvin X






















“Stargazer” (2007) by Elizabeth Catlett.


Art Spolight: Elizabeth Catlett,
“First an Outcast,
Then an Inspiration”
4 Jun 2011
Courtesy of Reginald and Aliya Browne


By CELIA McGEE

Published: April 21, 2011

While we are featuring the works of young, up-and-coming artists, this is an opportunity to get to know one of Americas most noted artist. Ms Catlett is the premier artist of our time and the exhibition which seeks to display works of new artists that are inspired by her is a fresh and exciting idea. Talking with her a bit last year in regards to the authenticity of a 1939 lithograph she did, Ms Catlett commented on how she was looking forward to this show while chastising those people forging her artwork George Bayard of Bayard Art Consulting said.

By CELIA McGEE

IN the fall of 1932, fresh out of high school, Elizabeth Catlett showed up at the School of Fine and Applied Arts of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, having been awarded a prestigious full scholarship there. But she was turned away when it was discovered that she was “colored,” and she returned home to Washington to attend Howard University.

Elizabeth Catlett

Seventy-six years later, the institution that had rejected her, now Carnegie Mellon University, awarded her an honorary doctorate in recognition of a lifetime’s work as a sculptor and printmaker. By then, after decades of living and making art in Mexico, she had become a legendary figure to many in the art world, to the point where some were even surprised to learn she was still alive.

But not everyone, and certainly not the far younger, primarily African-American artists included along with her in the show “Stargazers: Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation With 21 Contemporary Artists,” on view now at the Bronx Museum of Art. “A lot of people like her are just kind of myths,” said Hank Willis Thomas, whose gold-chain and cubic zirconia nod to both the abolitionists of the 19th century and to rappers, “Ode to CMB: Am I Not a Man and a Brother,” is in the show and shares with much of Ms. Catlett’s work a concern with the history of slavery and “the black body as commodity,” he said. “A lot of her work,” he added, “especially from the ’60s and ’70s, could pass as art of today.”

Ms. Catlett, now 96, is known for her work’s deep engagement with social issues and the politics of gender, race and deprivation. She started down this road during the Depression, when she participated in the Federal Art Project, and followed it consistently into the era of the activist Black Arts movement in the ’60s and beyond. Which is not to say she has focused on message at the expense of form: she prepared for her M.F.A. under Grant Wood at the University of Iowa (“he was so kind,” she recalled recently, and he always addressed her as “Miss Catlett”) and also studied in New York with the Modernist sculptor Ossip Zadkine and at the Art Students League, developing her own brand of figurative modernism in bronze, stone, wood, drawings and prints.

Though that style has often been compared to Henry Moore’s, her work has always been grounded in her perspective as a black woman and artist, ruminating on communal struggle, pride, resistance, resilience and history, particularly through her depictions of the female form.

The curator of the Bronx Museum show, Isolde Brielmaier, has juxtaposed 31 of Ms. Cattlet’s works with pieces by 21 other artists — less to point out her direct influences on them, Ms. Brielmaier said, than to explore resonances between the older artist and the younger ones. The idea, she added, was to make the show about “what all the artists are thinking, and to look at the past and the future.”

Ms. Catlett herself, who is back in New York this week for a panel discussion about “Stargazers” at the museum on Friday, demurs about her influence on later generations. (She is, however, clear about the most important advice she can offer an artist, she said during her previous visit to the city, in the fall: “Never turn down a show, no matter where it is.”) She has lived much of her life, after all, on the margins of an art history she and other artists of color were not invited to help write for a very long time.

In 1947, while on a fellowship in Mexico, she married the artist Francisco Mora, whom she had met through the Taller de Gráfica Popular printmaking collective. Their left-wing political associations did not endear her to the State Department, which declared her an undesirable alien when she took Mexican citizenship in 1962. This, on top of Ms. Cattlet’s race, contributed to her relative obscurity in the mainstream American art world.

Close

The photographer Carrie Mae Weems, a generation older than most of the other artists in “Stargazers,” recalled encountering Ms. Catlett “through reading on my own,” in the late 1960s. “She wasn’t taught to me in class, as most black artists were not taught to me in class, and most women artists.”

The show gets its title from Ms. Catlett’s black-marble “Stargazer” (2007), a reclining female figure that manages to feel just as powerfully assertive as her standing red-cedar sculpture “Homage to My Young Black Sisters” of 1968, with its black-power salute. The reversal of the traditional passivity of the odalisque figure, said the Moroccan-born artist Lalla Essaydi, who upends the convention in her own work, “is definitely something I quote.” And Ms. Catlett’s more militantly upright sculptures seem to reappear in Sanford Biggers’ monumental woodcut “Afro Pick” (2005), and in Roberto Visani’s recycling of guns and other weapons into works that are street-wise, loaded with history and totemic.

In keeping with Ms. Brielmaier’s aim for the show, the impact is not always a matter of visible influence. Mickalene Thomas, for example, said her intricately bedizened paintings and pattern-happy photographs do not draw on Ms. Catlett’s work in any obvious way, but that “she’s been very inspirational.”

“I like how her draftsmanship and sculpting have informed the political impact of images she created,” Ms. Thomas said, allowing work created with a specific ideological bent to nevertheless “take the African American experience and make it universal.”

Another artist in the show, Xaviera Simmons, also talked about her intense admiration for Ms. Catlett’s formal skills, and for the fact that she is “still working in her 90s, and making art that’s so technically savvy and stunning.”

“That’s kind of diva,” Ms. Simmons said.

Ms. Simmons is friends with Ms. Catlett’s granddaughters (one of whom, Naima Mora, is known to students of another discipline as a winner on “America’s Next Top Model”). When Ms. Brielmaier decided to include her large-scale photograph “One Day and Back Then (Seated),” which shows Ms. Simmons sitting in the type of rattan chair made famous by Huey P. Newton and wearing little more than black paint and an Afro wig, “I was a little afraid of offending my best friends’ grandmother,” she said. But then again, she thought, Ms. Catlett “has her nudes” — and ultimately, “we all work in the same tradition.”

via theblackbottom.com
Courtesy Neogriot.com

Race in America: The Grand Denial

RACE IN AMERICA: The Grand Denial

By Dr. Marvin X

Tuesday, September 16, 2009

Denial is quite simply the evasion of reality. Denial can be personal or communal, for sometimes an entire nation can be in denial about its abominations, for they are too painful to make adjustments in the collective psyche and the personal reality, for to do so would incriminate the mythology and ritual of said society, and thus the normal daily round would be disrupted and dysfunctional, for painful adjustments would be in order, and as long as we can avoid the painful the better, after all, the status quo can be maintained.

America has lived in grand denial. In the words of Baldwin , white supremacy has caused this nation to believe in rationalizations so fantastic it approaches the pathological. Racism has survived among slaves and masters and the descendants of slaves and masters far too long without any meaningful degree of reconciliation or compensation, even apology is long overdue. Other colonial societies such as the French and Australia recently apologized for colonialism, but not America , the chief colonizer of the modern world.

She is mainly guilty of domestic colonialism, having enslaved the Native Americans, and then kidnapped millions of Africans who were brought to these shores for eternal servitude. After emancipation, America promised the freed Africans a few acres and a mule, but never delivered. She promised freedom after her slaves provided 200,000 troops who were decisive in the Civil War, but disarmed them and returned them to virtual slavery called Reconstruction, which was short-lived and essentially put the freed slaves in neo-servitude, at the whim of terrorists known as Klu Klux Klan.

White America benefited from four centuries of slavery and neo-slavery. The neo slaves fought in her imperial wars against fascism abroad but were subjected to fascism upon returning home. A few slaves benefited from slavery, even having slaves themselves, yet in the end found themselves facing the glass ceiling, especially when they refused to be running dogs for imperialism now called globalism.

General Colin Powell is the most recent example. America duped him and made a fool of him before the world when he gave his fabricated United Nation’s speech to justify the invasion of Iraq . He was replaced with a more pliant Negress in the person of Condi Rice. We are urged to recognize racial progress in her shameful role as Secretary of State. We have achieved equality, for have we not placed ourselves (African Americans) in the position to be charged with war crimes, having justified the slaughter of a million Iraqi men, women and children in the unprovoked occupation and destruction of the jewel of Arabic culture and civilization?

But in our grand denial, blacks as well as whites will attempt to convince the world this point of view is left wing poppycock, the thoughts of a disgruntled segment of the black Americans who have failed to enjoy the benefits of capitalism, now globalism--no matter the disparities in birth and death, education, wage parity,incarceration, housing, health care, homicide and suicide, in every aspect of Americana.

To mention race is to open a can of worms best left unopened because it makes Americans nervous, uneasy, and disturbed mentally if not physically. White Americans are made to feel guilty, thus etiquette demands no mention of race in civil discourse or casual conversation because we are all too sensitive and the endgame might be violence of the worse kind.

And so we are mostly silent on the subject until this ugly monster of ours its head as it inevitably does from time to time, then after the most brief discussion, all sides are urged to sweep it under the carpet until the next round. Thus this racial drama continues ad infinitum without any real resolution and certainly no reconciliation. We may have a plethora of interracial marriages with the resultant biracial children, yet nothing has been solved except for a kind of don’t ask don’t talk racial harmony, along with the children growing up in racial confusion called the tragic mulatto syndrome, whereby they try as best they can to choose sides in this racial drama without end.

Clearly, Barak Obama is caught between the racism of his preacher and white grandmother. His endgame will be of great interest to the world at large, and even if he doesn’t become president of the US , he will have a role to play in racial politics globally. Obviously, his persona is bigger than America , having an African father and a Muslim middle name (Hussein) than has endeared him to the Islamic world, no matter the outcome of the presidential election.

With his now classic speech on race, putting himself in league with Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise and Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream, Obama, much to his dismay, has now become a Race Man, in the classic sense of that term whose definition escapes all but those of historical consciousness, which is most of us, black and white—except that we must now realize there is only the human race, except for those in league with me who claim membership in the Divine Race.

America's Grand Denial can only be overcome by recovery from our racist white supremacy heritage, beginning by accepting the scientific definition of the human race (or Divine, if you agree with my spiritual notion), then entering a program of detoxification, recovery and discovery.

Detoxification includes deprogramming our white supremacy values of domination and exploitation, including patriarchal authority and capitalist greed that has lead us to the present economy is nothing more than pimping by gunboat diplomacy. You sell me your labor and natural resources at the cheapest price or I will take them at gunpoint, under the guise of bringing you democracy” an advance from the naked colonial era of spreading Christianity.

Recovery is discarding the Grand Denial that there is a problem or that the problem has been remedied, therefore stop making whites the villain and blacks the victim, in fact, forget the entire matter—although blacks already suffer acute amnesia to the degree that they are a danger to themselves and others.

And who would tell a Jew to forget the Holocaust? And does not the Jew remind the world at every turn what the Germans did to them? We have a thousand times more right to tell the world what happened to us than any Jew, for our suffering lasted four centuries, not four or five years. For their four or five years (1939-1945) the Jews were given a state while we have not acquired one acre for four centuries (1619-2008) of slave labor and government sanctioned terror that even Hitler emulated with his destruction of the Jews.

In order to recover from the addiction to white supremacy, America must make a searching and fearless moral inventory; she must admit to God the exact nature of her wrongs; be ready to have God remove her defects of character (being saved by the grace of Jesus Christ has not and will not solve America’s white supremacy addiction—the white Christian mythology allowed us to be burned on the cross or lynching tree—yes, strangely similar to Jesus). Rev. James Cone suggests America can only recover from the addiction to white supremacy by coming to an understanding of the relationship of the cross and the lynching tree. Listen to Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit and ponder the life of Jesus Christ.

You have had Jesus in your midst for over four hundred years and crucified him on a daily basis, even unto this present hour. America must examine her census, her graveyards in the south and north, the bills of sale, the prison inmates, the mental hospital patients gone mad as a result of white supremacy addiction—then make a list of all the Africans harmed, the Native Americans, the poor whites treated worse than you treated niggers—then make amends to such people, including reparations in the form of land and sovereignty. Discovery for America in general will be when she accepts the radicalization of her culture to bring it in harmony with the global village, which involves the dismantling of institutions that perpetuate domination and exploitation of her citizens and other peace loving peoples throughout the world. If America persists in her Grand Denial, then she must prepare for her self destruction, for it shall come at the hands of the man in the mirror, not from any external forces. --Dr. M

Dr. M is the author of How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, A Pan African 13 Step Model, Black Bird Press, 1222 Dwight Way, Berkeley CA , $19.95.

How To Stop The Killing in the Pan African Hood

By Marvin X

"The reactionaries will never put down their butcher knives, they will never turn into Buddha heads."—Mao

We are talking about a condition in the hearts of men, an evil sore festering and stinking like rotten meat, to use that Langston Hughes metaphor. It is a spiritual disease more prevalent than HIV, for it consumes whole countries, not only Pan Africa, but it may be said to originate in Europe because lying and murder is the great theme of this culture, and Africa and Africans throughout the Diaspora are victimized and suffer this malady equally with their colonial Mother. See how Europe butchered the butcher's sons in Iraq, or is this the democratic way of life she is bringing to the sand nigguhs?

The problem is how to throw off the vestiges of colonialism to become the New Man and New Woman. Of course, we must first recognize how sick colonialism has made us throughout Pan Africa. Somehow we must bow down and ask forgiveness of our Higher Power, the ancestors, the living and the yet unborn. There must be a cleansing ritual performed until the mud and slime of Western culture is purged from our minds, bodies and souls. The Western gods must be destroyed, crushed to the earth and stomped into eternity, for they have blessed us with ignorance, superstition, greed, lust and pure evil, allowing us to become worse than beasts in the field, committing the worse atrocities, yea, even worse than all the teaching of our colonial masters.

No doubt Africa is paying for the great sin of sending her sons and daughters into slavery. Has Africa asked forgiveness of herself, yet she wails for apology from the slave master's children. Has she given reparations to her descendants lost in the wilderness of North America? Has she ever sent a symbolic ship or plane to bring them home? So Pan Africa lives a slow death because she allows corrupt, boastful, arrogant leaders to control her nations, her leaders shelter each other, covering their multiple sins, protecting themselves from people's justice that would rightfully hang them like Mussolini and his wife.

Like jack in the box, Pan Africa must jump out of her iniquities, she must call forth the divine energy within the bowels of her soul and step into the New Day of light, breath and health. She cannot allow her children to devour her from coast to coast, sea to sea, from America to Africa, but children only mock the behavior of adults, so we cannot blame them, children are children, so adults must step to the front of the line, no matter how busy they are doing nothing, for they are surely doing nothing if the village is in chaos, security being the top priority of civilization.

Everyone must become the central command, every man and woman must be about the business of teaching new values, new ways of thinking and acting that are not harmful to the human soul and the human condition. The world is so full of wisdom it escapes us because our quest is for the trivial, the low things of life, not the things in the upper room, but those in the basement, in the gutter of our minds and hearts, that is where we dwell, that is our focus and this is why we suffer.

Kobe gives his wife a four million dollar rock, but will it placate her soul, will material things correct a spiritual problem of faith and trust? The West has a sordid history buying people as Pan Africa can attest, but everyone is not for sale, those of integrity will jump ship, will eat the whip and the gun, for persecution is worse than slaughter, the Qur'an teaches. No, physical weapons cannot solve the problem. Look at Israel, she has the all the modern weapons but she cannot defeat the spirit of a people determined to be free. So Pan Africa's children can and must be armed with a new consciousness. Even Fidel Castro has said the new weapon is consciousness!

Like Johnny Appleseed, we must go about spreading consciousness, teaching unconditional love and forgiveness, sharing knowledge and wealth with the poor and ignorant, the brokenhearted and oppressed. I am not trying to be sentimental, but we can and must flip the script as they say in the hood. Again, like Jack, we must jump out the box of mental and physical oppression by taking a new look at reality, by stopping a moment to wonder at the pleasure in the sun, the trees, the sea and mountains, the glory of being alive each moment to share human love, being grateful we have a moment on this earth to whisper truth to children that they may rise and be a pleasure to the ancestors watching everywhere.

Yes, we must transcend block man and block woman, the block within ourselves even, and reach forth into the realm of new possibilities, not allowing evil and her brothers and sisters to control the air and sun that comes each day blessing us with another moment to walk in the light, escaping the darkness of ignorance, greed, lust and violence.

Black men, go into the hood and take the guns from your sons, yes the sons you abandoned, neglected and rejected, the sons who look like you although you deny this, the sons who walk with sad hearts, hardened because they long for you, for your love and guidance, for your wisdom and strength, after all, Mama did all she could to raise her manchild in the promised land. * * * * *

A Response to "Killing in the Pan Africa Hood"














By Rudolph Lewis

Marvin, there is great wisdom that should be heeded in your essay "How To Stop the Killing in the Pan African Hood." I am aware that a new set of values (though possessed by our enslaved ancestors but now abandoned under the "new world order") and a new perspective of our place in the world, of our past and future are earnestly needed in these dire times. The most important of these new perspectives is couched in your paragraph that reads as follows: Has Africa asked forgiveness of herself, yet she wails for apology from the slave masters' children. Has she given reparations to her descendants lost in the wilderness of North America? Has she ever sent a symbolic ship or plane to bring them home? So Pan Africa lives a slow death because she allows corrupt, boastful, arrogant leaders to control her nations, her leaders shelter each other, covering their multiple sins, protecting themselves from people's justice that would rightfully hang them like Mussolini and his wife.

In short, you suggest our critical sword should have a double edge—that is, the slave trade involved African nations and European nations collaborating for the purposes of wealth and power. They got rid of their "niggertrash." Many of those descendants of the tribal kings and chiefs who sold millions of slaves still play significant roles in the politics of today's African nations. And they will sell us again and their people again in the 21st century, if the World Bank and other internationalist (globalist), corporatist agencies offer the right price. (Check out Paul Kingsnorth's essay on South Africa and the ANCA Shattered Dream.)

In the contest for wealth and power, "black" and "white," however, are not real distinctions but illusions, a means for escapism or sidetracking those who wish to do the "good." I know "evil" has become a popular theme in the discussion of international politics and the resistance to corporate imperialism, especially from the bully pulpit of the presidency. So-called righteous men love to stand behind such symbolic bulwarks. I hope we do not become agents of such trite rhetoric—it indeed will lead us astray. It is necessary that we keep on the straight and narrow and keep both edges of our sword whetted sharp. At no time must we sink back into mythologizing the world for the sake of political convenience, to hear merely the rhythm of our own voices.

Beneath most Pan-African rhetoric (from the 19th century to the present), there is this underlying notion of Africa as paradise into which Satan (the white man) introduced evil. I recommend strongly that all Pan-Africanists and sympathizers and all other petty-bourgeois, pseudo-revolutionaries read the Malian Yambo Olouloguem's novel Bound to Violence. Or any non-romantic account of Africa before European trade began. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart will provide some evidence even in the "wholeness" of tribal life, all was not well.

Even though there was a sense of justice, and right and wrong. There were some practices or acts that were just horrid, unnecessary, and "evil." If true be told, there was more evil in Africa than one could shake a stick at. The process of empire building in Africa by Africans themselves and the perennial struggles for power and the retention of power included the wholesale slaughter of tribes (genocide), butchery, debauchery of every sort (religious, political and social), cannibalism, incest, and so on—all these acts of evil existed before modern Europe stepped onto the soil of Africa or worked out its first deal for a cargo of slaves. The emperors, kings and queens, and chiefs—to whom we have become so inured (and want to imitate by dress, manners, and religion)—did not achieve those aristocratic titles by their sweetness and benevolence but by the same means we are familiar with today in those who strive to rule and conquer. That is, they did it the old-fashioned way—by violence, exploitation, and oppression.. The aberrations we see in Africa and at home are not new. This violence for wealth and power is just as old as the first time one brother killed another for his wife or his ass. This contest for dominance has always been bloody and this violence and evil were not invented by Europe or whites. We must do away with this myth—the white man alone as incarnate Devil. Otherwise, in a perverse way, we make Africans less than human—we make them into externally corrupted angels. There is no sanctity in having a black skin or in Africanity.

This type of mythologizing gives our leaders too much credit and too much room for collaboration with corporate power and a means of duping the masses of the poor and the black working classes. It is no longer sustainable that we ask or recommend that the masses of "Pan-Africa" live vicariously by distant observation and/or proximity to power and wealth. That an elite should live in comfort and security while the great masses attend them hand and foot with all their hearts and souls is no longer acceptable if we truly have egalitarian goals for our society.

That kind of barbaric nobility is no longer proper in a civilized world in which democracy and human rights have been given revitalized meanings in which every man is a king and queen, or at least be acknowledged with that kind of respect, integrity, and dignity. Our critical sword should not only land on the heads of the great aberrations of society—the likes of a Idi Amin, a Mobutu, a Bokassa, or a Sgt. Doe or a Charles Taylor, but also those respectable heads of state like Mbeki, Obasanjo, and the other African leaders who smilingly welcomed Bush to Africa and are ever-ready to make their deals with globalization.

Such African leaders with such narrow interests sold our ancestors into the Americas. And not only those African leaders there, but also here at home, we should do some swinging at our black elected and appointed officials (city councilmen, legislators, cabinet secretaries), yes and also corporate and ecclesiastical functionaries, and other notable heads, such as the leaders of civil rights organizations like the NACCP, whose board is ruled by corporate executives or such flunkies and running dogs. They too must be made to pay for their sins of neglect and moral blindness. If we lapse into the anti-white, anti-American, anti-Western rhetoric, we will sorely miss the point and provide more fuel for these black elites to further misdirect the energies of the masses of Pan-Africa along lines of escapism and support for the status quo.

If we are to make real changes within our communities some of our petty bourgeois aspirations must be abandoned. We can no longer naively defend black middle-class sellout politicians and preachers. We must recognize a real change in the face, rhetorical aspirations, and the present corporate ties that our leaders have established. It is fine to cite Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, as some Pan-Africanist Marxists tend to do. That is well indeed. I am far from a white apologist—a corner in which some may want to paint me. But I do not want to be a black apologist, either -- I was not taught that way. The NAACP is headquartered here in Baltimore and they just had a conference and they had nothing to say about the 40% unemployment rate here among black males (18-35); the high murder rate (about 300 a year, mostly young black males); a 50% drop-out rate from high school; neighborhoods in which only 25% of adults have a high school diploma. Brothers and sisters are paraded to jails like our ancestors to Goree Island!!! Whatever the justification for their apprehension is inadequate and should cause some shame to those who run this city and those who support the powers to be—which here in a majority black city, means a black middle class and those who work government jobs or receive money from corporate elites

Damn, brother, we have grown ass men on the corner selling single cigarettes for 35 cents a piece. What kind of enterprise is that? And it is not just a few. Is that any way to gain a livelihood? And our shit-head leaders are worrying about whether Bush or democratic presidential candidates come to their meeting. Ain't that a matter to be indignant and upset about? But it seems we are so spiritually sick we take it as a norm the misery and the downtrodden state of the poor (black and white). That the oppressed are overlooked and allowed to continue to sink into the abyss is a grand betrayal by our leaders. Murder and mayhem is not just coming from the bottom dregs of society. We have a general slavery and devastation in which silence and passivity is imposed by poverty, the gun, and prisons?

With these reservations, I support heartily the sentiments contained in your plea for earnest black work, black renewal, and black progress. http://www.nathanielturner.com/

Bobby McFerrin's Beyond Words

Bobby Mcferrin's "Beyond Words"

Bluenote CD Vocals,
Bobby Mcferrin Piano,
Chick Corea Drums,
Omar Hakim Percussion,
Cyro Baptista Wooden flute,
Keith Rhodes Bass and Guitar,
Richard Bona

Reviewed by Marvin X
May 22, 2002 (c) 2002 by Marvin X

Bobby is indeed beyond words. Words cannot describe this bird from heaven singing outside my window as dawn approaches, singing sounds without words, beyond birds, beyond scatting, a world of his own, without peer, conjuring, configuring sounds that take us beyond the beyond, stopping by Brazil, getting off the boat in Africa, passing through America, stepping, prancing, dancing, chanting, floating on top of the piano and drums as they carry him along as he joins Sun Ra on some planet, maybe Jupiter, Mars, who knows where Bobby goes, but we go with him, enjoying a genius at work. What person on earth can be without the heavenly sounds of Bobby Mcferrin's Beyond Words? We are in childhood, playing in the mud, it tastes so good Mama has to whip us into the house, we don't care, whip me Mama, I gotta eat this mud. Take me, Bobby, into eternity, twist and turn at the corners of yesterday and tomorrow, never saying a word, just sounds from the Creator who blessed us with this wonder child, Bobby Mcferrin.

His persona changes from lover to friend to trickster: are we hearing the human voice or an instrument, a trumpet, flute, let it go, enjoy, stop trying to figure out the magician, we'll only get entangled up his sleeve, inside his hat, let the magic soothe, heal, stop trying to figure out what is and ain't real. Listen to the drummer tell Bobby, "I got ya [you] back, dance on, fly into the sun." And the piano says, "If you fall I will catch you, so swim, run, jump, do anything-I ain't goin [going] nowhere [anywhere]."

My overall favorite is "fertile field," beginning with a whistle; a fast paced, energetic, aggressive, up-tempo piece into Bobby Land, where few can go. Chick is with him neck and neck, along with drummer Omar--traveling the space ways (as Sun Ra would say) with equal energy. Bobby touches down in South Africa for a quick Miriam Makeba click, moves on to silence rappers, stop poets in mid sentence-vocalists, don't even come on stage; indeed, brother is beyond words, beyond this world.

Another favorite is "Pat and Joe," a brief enchanting piece featuring Richard Bona's guitar, with chorals and Bobby chanting as it glides into the sunset or over the horizon. "Mass" is also an enchanting choral piece with Bobby again chanting throughout? Percussionist Baptista completes the circle. I see the entire album as a choreographer's dream. It should make excellent music for a chorus of spiritual dancers. Maybe I'll choreograph it for my Recovery Theatre! Just thank Jesus, as Bobby does, and thank Chick Corea, piano, Richard Bona, bass and guitar, Omar Hakim, drums, Cyro Baptista, percussion, Keith Rhodes, wooden flutes. Go Bobby, go Bobby.

Now the Christians might say, "That boy [is] talking in tongues," and they would be right because essentially that is exactly what he does, transcending not only English but all other languages, for they have all failed us, yes, even the varieties of our Mother tongue-obviously they failed to keep us off the ships, which was their primary and ultimate failure-yes, a total, abysmal and horrendous breakdown of communication, reflecting a degeneration of a people's soul, heart and mind, but most importantly, a collapse of all their social institutions, instigated by the ruling classes who perverted language into a tool of deception for human exploitation, after all, language allowed humans to become chattel, persuaded African armies to capture neighbors and even their own citizens; allowed judges to falsely charge, convict and sentence millions to enslavement; language guided us to the door of no return, along with the gun and rum.

Bobby has accomplished what many poets attempt after we realize we are captives of English and seek to liberate ourselves with pure sound, grunts, wails, moans, anything but English, the oppressor's filthy tongue, so vile it is called a bastard language. Bobby has succeeded with sounds as pure as the driven snow, primal incantations, fresh as a child from the mother's womb, thus the healing power of his music: we are forced out of this world, the oppressive vowels and consonants that make up the words which are the source of our collective madness, the vehicle for transmission of myths and rituals which compose our daily lives, that allow us to behave like beasts with each other, a constant denial and misrepresentation of our Divine essence. Man in the Mirror, look at yourself lost in the Valley of the Shadow of death, in the matrix of conspicuous consumption, obsessive materiality, to the extent that you would employ wage slaves around the world so you can wear expensive shoes, that you would kill your brother in the hood and steal his shoes.

Only by returning to our aboriginal language can we liberate ourselves from this oppressive social order and begin anew, a new consciousness, a new mind, a new soul. This is precisely why the Christians talk in tongues; talk their holy language, the language of the Ghost, the unseen source from the primal essence of our soul. When the Christians heard me recite Arabic at my son's funeral, they said, "That boy [is] talking in tongues." Indeed, Arabic and tongues are the same sound, same vowels and consonants. And we ain't Arabic, but Arabic derives without doubt from the ancient Himyaritic of Ethiopia, source of the first man, we are told. Why would the first man come from there but not his language, and his religion, for that matter? Ethiopia is the source of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as well: the Kushites or Blacks from Ethiopia were the aboriginal Arabians, who dwelled there before the Semites, inhabiting the land from the Persian Gulf to Yemen, to Jerusalem, where they were known as the Canaanites, brothers of the Egyptians/Ethiopians. Diop, Dr. Ben, Rogers, DuBois and other have written on this subject.

Bobby shows us how to transcend this world and all therein. As Jesus said, we can be in this world, but not of it. Alas, silence would be better than bitch, ho and motherfucker. But these words are not nearly as detrimental as the outright abject, obscene, profane defilement of truth used by political leaders such as Bush, Powell, Rice and Rumsfeld, and the hypocritical language of religious leaders who pimp, rob and exploit believers, promising them residue from slavery in the form of a fictionalized, juvenile, fabricated, imaginary heaven in the sky after they die. You religious swine, how dare you cry about the use of bitch, ho and motherfucker by me, rappers or anybody, while you have sex with your own children, murder in the name of God, sell drugs in the name of God, Christians and Muslims alike around the world, from Afghanistan to Colombia. If our tongues are vile, imagine what your souls look like! May God have mercy on you vipers. And let us not neglect to mention the deceptive language of the media-pharaoh's magicians, whose gross sins of commission and omission keep the people deaf, dumb and blind-as the media Mongols confessed after 911-yet they continue in their inordinacy, blindly wandering on, as the Qur'an says. The Qur'an also says, "Will you hide the truth while you know?"

So let us go then, beyond words, beyond the ship, beyond the shore, beyond the forest up the mountain path where the Divine awaits us to come be one and indivisible, to be pure, holy, righteous and free while we live. Bobby is calling us to go there: go Bobby, go Bobby.
Marvin X is one of the founders of the Black Arts Movement, poet, playwright, essayist, author of 30 books. He is called the USA's Rumi (Bob Holman), Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland CA (Ishmael Reed), the father of Muslim American literature (Dr. Mohja Kahf), One of the founders and innovators of the revolutionary school of African writing (Amiri Baraka).He is available for reading/ performance/ lectures on a variety of topics. He lectures and reads his poetry from coast to coast.
jmarvinx@yahoo.com. Visit http://www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com.

Comment on Why I'm A Narrow Minded Black Nationalist

Comment on Marvin X's Why I'm a Narrow Minded Black Nationalist

Comment from Gerald Ali, United Kingdom

Well written, states the case clearly, but one point lacking, where ??? What part of the usa/usa would be good to found such a nation ?? My view from outside the usa/usa is south..... The gulf is an opening to the world, by water, Mexico... and below is an opening to trade, which in this world is needed by all nations, below in south America, the Caribbean, are more of African descent. All nations need farmers, hamlets, villages [where so many of the earths people actually live] towns, but in a future world do they/ will they need cities or are they of the past ??? Or can a society be reconstituted differently, can the barriers between town and country be broken/removed and yet the nation still be organised ???

Children are ''alienated' from the earth, most particularly by city life...... End the alienation, they will grow up as full human beings.... Karl Marx said the proletariat was ''alienated from the means of production, in bourgeois society''', some are small minded, literalists, they do not apply the concept, so do not realise its full meaning. The earth is itself the means of production of human life and all that sustains it. As with all other life......So the call was not just for the proletariat to take control of the means of production in the cities, but for people generally to take control of the earth from the bourgeois class....
So what in full reality, as a living entity is a nation. ??? Migration south, till a majority is reached in one, possibly more states, but it will need farmers, village people, workers etc. Any American is open to live in any state of the 50 in the union. Will it need to be organised migration, that is what or should be under discussion.

Reply by Marvin X

The south is the North American African homeland, although we claim the planet earth and the universe. The south has access to the sea, such as the Carolinas, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, etc. Yes, we must be on land as the original means of production. There may be a need for city states where we are in abundance, such as Brooklyn, Harlem, South side of Chicago, Atlanta.

In many areas of the south we are the majority or near majority, it would not take a great effort to buy the whites out, a reverse gentrification. But what is most important is for us to first have a revolution in consciousness, to detox and recover from our addiction to white supremacy Type II (Dr. Nathan Hare). We cannot live in a nation with reactionary values and behavior, we must rid ourselves of negative conduct, such as expressions of self hatred, jealousy, envy, greed, yes, those tragic flaws that cause the destruction of society.

Even now, throughout the south, North American African politicians, religious leaders and educators are under indictment for improprieties. We want to exercise devil minded behavior that must be outlawed in the "Republic of New Africa." Those who persist in such behavior would be banished back to white America. As we did in Africa, we can have a society with no police and no jails. Our economic system would be based on Gross National Happiness, rather than gross national product. It must be a fair market system rather than free market. There must be a living wage for workers. Under the pain of death or banishment, partner violence, verbal abuse and emotional abuse would be outlawed.

Spirituality would be the order of the day, as opposed to religion. As per gender, unity and equality in diversity would be the law. We must recognize men and women are different beings. Men do not bleed five days per month, nor do they get pregnant. This does not make them unequal, only different. Leadership would be based on knowledge, not gender.

In our foreign relations, Pan Africanism would be our first priority, to have functional unity with our people in Africa and throughout the Americas, or where ever we are throughout the earth and in the universe. We recognize our people from outer space.

We would maintain a symbiotic relationship with the United States of America, for we may need assistance for the next 25 to 50 years, just as the US assisted Israel and shall soon assist the Palestinians. We would most certainly have relations with all nations in the Americas, especially such progressive countries as Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Brazil, but wherever African people are, e.g., Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Columbia, Guyana, etc.

These matters are for our thinkers and planners to configure. Blacks have been migrating back to the south for years.

Now there are those North American Africans in the south who are in denial about the white man, who imagine they know how to deal with him since they've been doing so for centuries.
We say many of them are in denial, if not simple ignorance. Many of our people in the south are in virtual slavery, mental and physical, ignorant wage slaves who must maintain three minimum wage jobs to survive. Yes, one can live in a mansion for $100,000, but outside the mansion is a hostile environment, steeped in racism and religiosity. Must we repeat the words of Harriet Tubman, "I could have freed more slaves if they had known they were slaves"?

If we are to prevent the Second Civil War, separation is in order, the same that must occur between a husband and wife who have found themselves disagreeable to live with in peace.

Let us move expeditiously toward Nation Time. But we have no desire to be in a nation of reactionary Negroes who want to party and bullshit. Those welcome must desire radical consciousness, spiritual, political, economic and cultural.

--Marvin X

6/7/11

Elijah Muhammad, Messenger of Allah to the Socalled Negro

February 26, 1975
OBITUARY
Elijah Muhammad Dead; Black Muslim Leader, 77
Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES

Chicago, Feb. 25--Elijah Muhammad, spiritual leader of the nation's Black Muslims, died here today of congestive heart failure.

The death of the 77-year-old "Messenger of Allah," as his followers called him, came as thousands of Muslims were gathering in Chicago for their biggest annual religious celebration, Saviour's Day, scheduled for tomorrow.

Mr. Muhammad suffered from heart trouble, bronchitis, asthma and diabetes. He entered Mercy Hospital Jan. 30.

Mr. Muhammad was considered by Black Muslims as the "Last Messenger of Allah." Strict adherence to that belief might cause some problems of succession, but it is expected generally that one of his sons will assume the leadership.

Mr. Muhammad is survived by six sons and two daughters.

Built Religious Body
By C. Gerald Fraser

In his 41 years as its spiritual leader, Elijah Muhammad molded the Nation of Islam into a significant religious body.

At the same time, he developed the Nation of Islam's empire of schools in 46 cities, restaurants, stores, a bank, a publishing company that prints the country's largest circulating black newspaper, and 15,000 acres of farmlands in three states that produce beef, eggs, poultry, milk, fruit and vegetables delivered across the country by Nation of Islam-owned truck and air transport.

Elijah Muhammad did not create the Nation of Islam but he built it on a number of principles. Among them: Islam is the true religion, "knowledge of self" is vital, "doing for self" is necessary, the black man is supreme and the white man is "the devil."

These principles caught the imagination of thousands of mostly young, male and female, lower-class black American former Christians who became followers of Mr. Muhammad. And recently, black professionals--physicians, police officers and the college-educated, for example--have joined the movement. Estimates of membership range from 25,000 to a high of 250,000 claimed by the movement.

These principles also brought down upon the Nation of Islam scorn from black and white Americans. But Elijah Muhammad contended that to call whites "blue-eyed devils" was neither to hate them nor to teach hate. "They say that I am a preacher of racial hatred," Mr. Muhammad once said, "but the fact is that the white people don't like the truth, especially if it speaks against them. It is a terrible thing for such people to charge me with teaching race hatred when their feet are on my people's neck and they tell us to our face that they hate black people. Remember now, they even teach you that you must not hate them for hating you."

Comments by Marshall

Many blacks did not buy that explanation. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a black liberal and a civil rights lawyer in 1959, said then that Mr. Muhammad's organization was "run by a bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails and financed, I am sure, by Nasser [Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt] or some Arab group." Justice Marshall added that followers of Mr. Muhammad were "vicious" and a threat to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and state law enforcement agencies.

The negative view was shared by most blacks described by the press as "black leaders." But a black conservative, George Schuyler, a columnist for The Pittsburgh Courier, held the view more common to many among the black masses. "Mr. Muhammad," Mr. Schuyler wrote in 1959, "may be a rogue and a charlatan, but when anybody can get tens of thousands of Negroes to practice economic solidarity, respect their women, alter their atrocious diet, give up liquor, stop crime, juvenile delinquency and adultery, he is doing more for Negroes' welfare than any current Negro leader I know."

There were thugs, dope addicts and prostitutes in the Nation of Islam. But their conversion from criminal to believer was viewed in black communities as a near miracle. Blacks were awed by the discipline, and admired the orderliness the followers displayed. Where home, school and church had failed many of the followers, Mr. Muhammad had succeeded.

The opportunity to be "somebody" was one of Mr. Muhammad's major offerings to black men and women who joined the Black Muslims--the name given the group by Dr. C. Eric Lincoln, chairman of the department of religion and philosophical studies at Fisk University and author of "The Black Muslims in America."

Dr. Charles V. Hamilton, a political scientist and member of the Columbia University faculty, said Elijah Muhammad "was one of the few who has been able to combine religion and race with a rather continuing economic influence."

Fard Founded Nation

Actually, the concepts preached and practiced by Mr. Muhammad were handed to him by the founder of the Nation of Islam, W. D. Fard, or Master Farad Muhammad. Where Mr. Fard came from and where he went when he dropped out of sight are unknown. But in a 1930 Depression-ridden Detroit, "The Prophet," as he was known to customers who bought the fabrics he peddled from door-to-door, created the Temple of Islam.

He told those who listened that he had come to "wake the Dead Nation of the West," that he would teach the truth about the white man, that blacks must get ready for Armageddon--the inevitable confrontation between black and white--that black men were not to be called "Negroes" and that Christianity was the religion of the slavemasters.

Mr. Fard established Temple No. 1 in Detroit, the University of Islam--the temple's elementary and secondary school, Muslim Girls Training Class and the Fruit of Islam-- the elite corps of males assigned to protective and disciplinary functions.

As was his practice, Mr. Fard gave his followers their "original" name, and the man who came to him as Elijah Poole received the name Elijah Muhammad. Mr. Fard selected a Minister of Islam and a staff of assistant ministers. Elijah Muhammad, as one of the assistants, became very close to Mr. Fard, and after Mr. Fard disappeared in 1934, Elijah Muhammad became the Minister of Islam.

Mr. Fard has since been deified as Allah and his birthday, Feb. 26, is observed throughout the Nation of Islam as Saviour's Day.

Elijah Muhammad's ascent is another instance of a black man from a small Southern town who achieved national eminence as a religious leader. He was born in Sandersville, Ga., on Oct. 7, 1897. His parents were sharecroppers--and former slaves. His father, Wali Poole, was also a Baptist preacher, and Elijah was one of 13 children.

His formal education ended at the fourth grade, and at 16 he left home. In 1919 he married Clara Evans and in 1923, with two children, they moved to Detroit. A series of jobs included work on a Chevrolet assembly line.

The Detroit experience was as critical to his later activities as were his modest beginnings. Mr. Fard and Mr. Muhammad were building a Northern urban movement in bad economic times with predominantly Southern-born blacks.

At various times in Detroit during the nineteen-thirties Communists, anti-union, pro- Ethiopian and pro-Japanese elements tried to co-opt the movement. In this period Elijah Muhammad was arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor because he sent his children to the University of Islam instead of to Detroit's public schools. And finally, internal turmoil within the Detroit temple caused Mr. Muhammad to move to Chicago, where he established Temple No. 2.

Along with non-Muslims, Elijah Muhammad was arrested in Chicago in 1942 and charged with sedition and violation of the Selective Service Act.

Cleared of the sedition charges, he was convicted of exhorting his followers to avoid the draft and he was sent to Federal prison in Milan, Mich., for about four years. He was credited with controlling the Nation of Islam from his prison quarters.

Role of Malcolm X

It was a man who joined the Nation of Islam in prison, however, who gave the movement its greatest exposure. El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz--Malcolm X.

Malcolm X joined the Nation of Islam in a Massachusetts prison. He was released from jail in August, 1952, and his rise paralleled the period of most significant growth in black awareness.

Malcolm X was Elijah Muhammad's most prominent apostle. Malcolm X was the chief spokesman, the main recruiter; he brought the heavy-weight boxing champion Muhammad Ali into the movement. But by 1963 Malcolm X was disenchanted, while denying that he was a rival of Mr. Muhammad for top leadership. He believed Mr. Muhammad's religious interpretations that excluded Caucasian Moslems too narrow, and he was concerned by the Black Muslims' policy of non-engagement in civil rights and political affairs.

In the 10 years since Malcolm X's assassination by three said to be Black Muslims, Elijah Muhammad ruled his movement from its Chicago headquarters. (Occasionally, he spent time in Phoenix, where the climate relieved some of his asthmatic discomfort.)

Mr. Muhammad, a small man about 5 feet 5 inches tall with a high, thin voice, held court in his offices, listening to aides, weighing their reports by balancing what they said with the qualities he saw in them as individuals. He was serious but witty and verbally creative. He illustrated many of his spiritual lessons about the need of blacks to elevate their behavior, as he saw it, with little humorous dramatic sketches.

Although Mr. Muhammad personally enjoyed disasters that befell whites, seeing them as Allah's work, he sought to prevent any public expression of Muslim enjoyment of the event. Thus, he suspended Malcolm after Malcolm X had said of the assassination of President Kennedy that the "chickens had come home to roost."

He prevented Black Muslims from participating in the country's political process, including any political activity on behalf of a separate state, because, he contended, what was to be achieved by the Nation of Islam was to be achieved divinely, though natural catastrophes and warring among whites on a national and international scale.

Relations with American black Moslem groups have become increasing hostile since the assassination of Malcolm X. Black Muslims were accused of killing seven persons associated with the Hanafi Muslims in Washington two years ago. And Sunni Muslims in Brooklyn were said by the police to have tried to steal guns from a sporting goods store to prepare for a war with Black Muslims.

In recent years, Mr. Muhammad moderated the anti-white tone of the religion. He remarked last year that "The slavemaster is no longer hindering us, we're hindering ourselves. The slavemaster has given you all he could give you. He gave you freedom. Now get something for yourself."

Elijah Muhammad was a mystic. But his mysticism was applied; it always had a quite earthly purpose. Forerunning transcendental meditation and other modern popular sects, he saw the need for 20th-century religions to declare themselves based on science, not faith. Islam was a science and a "way of life," not a religion, he said. Yet, he would refer to the Mother Plane, a mysterious space ship with superior beings, giant black gods or something like that, that patrolled the universe, keeping an eye on the devil and ready to rescue Black Muslims from Armageddon.