The History of Black August

The History of Black August

Marvin X Speaks at Howard University

Marvin X at Howard University, Washington DC

Final Notes on Mythology of Pussy Lecture


Marvin X ended his visit at Howard University with a reading/discussion of Mythology of Pussy, specifically focusing on psychosexuality at Howard. But it wasn’t until the end of his lecture/discussion that a female student dropped a bomb on him, telling him the answer he had been seeking: how Howard women deal with the brothers to satisfy their sexual needs. A sister whispered to him, “Mr. X, we get what we want from the brothers by tossing them around. They think they’re tossing us, but we do the tossing. If we want Joe tonight, we get him, then let another sister have him the next night, but he thinks he’s getting over on us—it ain’t so. We calling the shots! If a girl wants Dante and another does as well, we tell one girl to hold up, let sister have Dante tonight, you get him tomorrow. That’s how we do it.”

And so it is. As Nisa Ra said in her comments on Mythology of Pussy, “Men think they are players when, in fact, they are getting played. He thinks it’s his pussy—but he don’t have a pussy!” Howard student President L. Davis, my homeboy from the Bay (Richmond, Ca—and thanks Prez for your assistance while I was at Howard)—said during the meeting that the girls chose “silly nigguhs” rather than real down brothers, real men!

My thought is that silly girls chose silly nigguhs, especially since it’s all about pussy and dick, nothing more, although I called upon students to get to a higher level as Phavia says in her poem Yo, Yo, Yo: “If you think I’m just a physical thing, wait til you see the spiritual power I bring….” Students appeared to understand the need to resocialize and recover from the addiction to white supremacy mythology.

For now though, it’s all about P and D as Sun Ra called it. One brother came to the meeting only to give me five dollars since he had gotten a pamphlet last week. He told me he’d read it and that I was on the right path. He said, “Don’t back up, don’t back up, keep going forward with Mythology of Pussy.”

Indeed, when I asked the audience should I say Mythology of P—they said hell no, say Mythology of Pussy!

In my final remarks on Howard, I must give an evaluation of my host professor, Dr. Greg Carr, one of the finest young scholars black America has produced. From what I heard and observed, he is well loved by students. I would say he is the hardest working man in academia—the James Brown of black scholars—I was exhausted watching him teach. As brother Ptah (another bright scholar from San Francisco State University who is my colleague) noted, “Dr. Carr is like a rapper with his high energy level.” Indeed, he paces back a forth from black board to black board, writing important names, places and dates. He is thorough and detailed, going through the text word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page.

But while this is an index of his acumen, it reveals the abject failure of students coming prepared to his lecture. As he said to me, simply, “They don’t read!” And so he must essentially baby-sit them because they come to class unprepared, forcing him to go through the text they should have read beforehand. This reveals their laziness, sloth and lack of respect for the great mind before them. This is one reason I am not in academia: I would kick those slothful nigguhs out my class. I would not baby-sit them—either come prepared or get the hell out. If I’m prepared, you better be also—don’t disrespect me. I’m here to give you knowledge, you’re giving me nothing except revealing your negrocities (Baraka term).”

But perhaps Dr. Carr realizes the students are victims of American education that makes them dumb at best—compared to what? Not compared to white American students but compared to students in China and India, students whose genius and fortitude is reflected in the rapid advance of their nations in the era of globalism.

This is why the white man is outsourcing to India and China. Why should he pay an American MBA $140,000 per year when he can hire an Indian MBA for $14,000 per year who is just as, if not more qualified than his American counterpart? And so I call upon Howard students to come out of their sloth and give Dr. Carr, Dr. Tony Medina and other young scholars equal energy and effort. In the words of Marcus Garvey, up you mighty people, you can accomplish what you will! And in the words of David Walker, let us dispel our ignorance and wretchedness in consequence of education.
--Marvin X
Howard University
Washington, DC
30 September, 2009

Parable of Desirelessness

Parable of Desirelessness

During his life, he'd had everything, money, dope, women, more love than any man could handle. In short, he was spoiled rotten. Now he was bored to tears. Maybe he was just an ungrateful bastard, since his cup had run over with goodness and mercy.

While on drugs, he discovered he needed very little, although he desired much. As a dope addict he survived on nothing but dope. No woman, no sex, food, clothes, bath, place to stay. Nothing but dope. For a time he lived in a cardboard box, slept in an alley or doorway. Sometimes he had a woman in the box with him. They smoked dope, made love and prayed in the box.

But it came to a point when he did his dope alone. He hustled alone, coped his dope and went to his room and smoked. In his supreme selfishness, he cut loose his friends. He definitely wouldn't get loaded with them because they were a nuisance. So he lived in solitude except for the demons in his head who visited him nightly. They talked to him and became real people. They were outside his door, he imagined. He could hear them talking. They were going to kill him for sure. They were outside his door discussing how to slay him. He heard them talking in the wind, the rustle of the leaves on the tree. They talked to him each night. It went on for years.

Finally, he did self recovery--no program worked for him, only because he wouldn't work it, thinking he was smarter than the recovery people. They told him to just relax and let himself heal, but he wouldn't. He wanted to continue writing in recovery. They told him not to write, just still himself and heal. So he left the program. This went off and on for years until he decided to recover his way. He went to ocean beach and let the cold ocean heal him. He went to the hot tub and relaxed. People could see he was healing. They could see it in his skin--there was a glow that was obvious to all.

As he recovered, he began to ponder what things he needed to survive. Did he need a woman that was usually a vexation? Most friends were a vexation. He eliminated women and men. Then his car, another vexation. He rode the bus. Got rid of his cell phone. No TV, no video player.
The black movies he found disgusting. He listened to the radio, mainly the news, even though it was bullshit white supremacy misinformation, fiction, his doctor said. He lived in his imagination and devoted time to his greatest joy, thinking and writing.

He gave his writings away on the street. It was his way of giving something back as they teach in recovery. And he shared his wisdom with whomever sought him out, but he sought out no one.
Of course he loved his children and grandchildren and would do anything for them, if and when they needed him.

But mostly, he realized there was nothing out there, but all was inside the self. So where was there to go except inside himself, to unravel the conundrums within his wretched self. Maybe he could raise himself to higher ground, maybe reach the upper room of his father's house. Surely he had been down in the dungeon, the bottomless pit of life. Where else can one go but up. But up is not out, rather within, peeling away the one billion illusions of the monkey mind Guru Bawa taught us about.

What is there to need, what is there to desire, to want? This can be an endless search into the void, the chasm of nothingness and dread. He refused to go there. He'd seen his friends go there, the endless search for things, trinkets, like children in Toys R Us, running here, running there to consume.

And yet there was no need, only desire, and desire was infinite, never ending except in frustration and dread. Desire was an intoxicant, a drug worse than all other drugs combined. The only thing to desire was no desire, to detox and recover from all illusions. Solomon told us all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

And so he looked inside the self, not selfishly, but selflessly with desirelessness. And he found satisfaction, for the more he had nothing, the more he had everything. The more he stilled himself, the more his mind opened to infinite possibilities.

This was not poverty consciousness but the consciousness that all is illusion, transitory and ephemeral. For what do you do when you have everything, yet in an instant it is wiped out. Remember the fire storm in the Oakland/Berkeley hills? And there you stand ready to destroy the self that remains, yet the self was the only reality.

Self is beyond individual. It is communal. Self is the breathing world. When we recognize the personal, we acknowledge the communal, the connection will all that is real and everlasting. Thus the test of the self is in interaction with other selves, no matter how vexing the encounter. Silence will save the day. Listen to the thousand voices in the silence of the wind.

Rumi said it best, "If you come to the garden, it don't matter. If you don't come to the garden, it don't matter."
--Marvin X
4/15/16

Review: Eldridge Cleaver and Memoirs

Eldridge Cleaver, Marvin X and Memoirs

By Rudolph Lewis, editor Chickenbones
http://www.nathanielturner.com/





Marvin has a "memoir." Promotionally, it is about Eldridge Cleaver, my least favorite Black Panther. I am down with Huey. For Bobby there is always gagged in Chicago .

There was whiteness: everybody could see that fairly well by 1969 and we could see that it was a whiteness that did not tolerate and doesn't allow you to pretend that you have no understanding of whiteness and its operations. In this game of subjection, Eldridge's point indeed in his crazed cranium, mistakes nor ignorance aren't forgiven. All literary work is about "power"—that is mastery.

For a month or so I daily saw this writer writing a book—piece by piece (part by part). Marvin X exudes power. He just turned 65 but he removes space like Archie Moore 44 in the ring. The book is Marvin. I know it is an odd thing to say a book is an author. If that is the case this “memoir” is indeed a memoir in the most perfect sense of one thing being another. Marvin pulls his memoir through the mode of “storytelling.”

Marvin, his memoir, each identifies with the people: to paraphrase Langston, in all their beauty and ugliness too. Marvin can walk into a barroom and in seconds have everyone laughing or falling out on the floor. Marvin doesn’t feel uncomfortable like Cornel West speaking before a class of black middle-class folk, or uncomfortable like other self-corporate prophetic leaders. These are objects of his jest, ridicule, scorn. Their pretensions, their respectability. Other than a poet, playwright, director, publisher, and editor, Marvin X is a recovering addict who works daily in drug invested communities.

He knows where his allegiance lies and in whom to invest. I want to be open in this discussion as much as necessary. I encouraged this book while Marvin was writing madly and emailing part after part, revision after revision. I found it all so riveting. Watching a writer write a book himself day after day, hour after hour, and the next thing I know we are on part 32, is quite an unusual and extraordinary experience.

The writing process is indeed important. Each of us has his own way of going about it. Marvin’s last approach, similar to other Marvin escapades, intentionally and directly seeks an audience for his memoir. Actually, he was out on the road—a book tour. In Houston , Texas. On a book tour, Marvin sends what one might call a “barrage” of responses to event or current events, keeping in touch with friends, writers, publishers and more.

In ways he is always a political organizer as well as self-promoter. He makes his way as speaker, writer, event organizer, performer. He keeps people tied to one another and valuing their lives. Marvin is uniquely developed into an informed black man who is religious, spiritual, and political.

He is as representative of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), then and now, as anyone I can think. In ways Marvin is galactic to the point you think he’s standing still, still mired in the betraying clays of the 1960s and 1970s. Ones need to be half-crazed, extremely intelligent, and extraordinarily visionary for his words to reenact the BAM world, as is achieved in memoir, to see the hole we are clearly in and still remain faithful that “Blackness” will find a way.

The memoir fell silent. Marvin moved onto South Carolina . Then he was in New York , Philly. And then New Jersey . Where he hooks up with his buddy, Amiri Baraka. From what I observed for the last decade is that Marvin loves Baraka, right or wrong, and would die for Baraka. This day. This moment view love I knew when I was a soldier out on the streets of Baltimore . Brothers I would die for. That kind of enthusiasm about changing whiteness in the land and thus the world, well, that kind of “militancy” was buried with Mr. Jim Crow. The resulting vision of the NAACP.

Marvin X suspends the past present future like a diamond and makes us believe in “blackness” when it has grayed and entered a nursing home. Yet Marvin believes, he’s a soldier to the death. I did not want Marvin’s memoir to end. We were only at the beginning, though at chapter 39, chapters fairly short.

In New York Marvin was talking about Amiri’s response and willingness to help secure Marvin a book deal for his memoir. From Marvin I received some piece of a rejection notice, all too stereotypical. I do not know where the cat was. But it seems he did not think the “memoir” was worthy of work or revision. What Marvin has as his “memoir” is indeed phenomenal. In its present form one can find nothing like it or better in representing the BAM world. The larger frame of the book could withstand double its size.

The expose could be put to work toward understanding what caused BAM writers to decline, and why the BAM literary legacy is more critical, than before or since the Harlem Renaissance . Two extraordinary playwrights. August Wilson and Marvin X have maintained their reverence and significance of the BAM period. Maybe Wilson is more introspective. Maybe less or differently ideological than Marvin. But both believing there is indeed such a thing as a “black perspective,” whether you want to agree with it or not.

It is this kind of daily believing that makes Marvin X our saving grace. Many of us are too willing to give up the significance and totality of what can be called Black Life in America , of the significance of identity in the personal, social, and economic progress or “success.” One cannot have a healthy psychic if one half of your people are free and the other half wallow in ignorance and superstition. How Moses satisfied such a state of being? I don’t want to hear about COINTELPRO or slave catchers.

I want to hear more on how or why Huey died the way that he did. I want to hear more about why Cleaver’s madness was entertained by anyone sane in the black community—a rapist and murderer. I want real discussion why Baraka’s walk away from cultural nationalism of the 1970s no less an act of betrayal than Cleaver in Cuba , in Algeria , in France , and black in the United States .

The expose does not work so well if there's no thorough attempt to make any sense out of BAM failing to seize the high ground. Maybe there was an inadequacy, a sweep in BAM, that was too large, too public, and in other aspects too personal, to be sustained as a social movement for a people spread out across a nation.

I love Jimi Hendrix not one iota less to know that he died (by some reports murdered) in a drug house. My love for Huey is eternal. What I’ve heard and read so far brings nothing of import to account for Huey’s rise and fall. That’s from Marvin as well. How Huey came to the drug house? How for that matter Marvin X? Often we see it more in the light of spectacle, of shame, and guilt. Not only drug use but the entire cultural breakdown of race, sex, and gender, during that period, breaking down for new frontiers. At the time we were all under its spell. Woodstock !!! Too many of us cultural radicals have warped into cultural conservatives, sometimes a too willingness to serve the Beast, at other times a cold hard decision, like “Allah does not pay as much as Jesus.” We are all Januses. Some more fortunate than others.

At the Crack House the doors of Hell are open, how low a man, a woman will stoop, what acts she will perform for crack’s grain of joy. The deconstruction of crack must continue. That the whole scene is made unlawful shows how far the respectable stoops to crush any kind of resistance, political, social cultural or otherwise.

I’ve read two other memoirs by black male writers: one Jerry W. Ward, Jr., The Katrina Papers (2008, $18.95) and the other by E. Ethelbert Miller, The 5th Inning (2009). Miller’s memoir is more personal, though it too contains social commentary. Jerry Ward’s work is post-modern, the memoir imitates, sets itself up as the same powerful forces of post-Katrina—powerful with the fragments of people’s lives on motor boats and housetops; great sludge and dead bodies floating down the streets of your neighborhood.

Marvin self published his memoir. Each of these memoirs is special. Read them. My feeling is that most publishers are not interested in black male memoirs. But many readers including females may find a great interest in these three black male writers and how differently they situate black life in America .

--Rudolph Lewis, Editor, Chickenbones.com
www.nathanielturner.com

Eldridge Cleaver: My friend the Devil, A Memoir by Marvin X

Eldridge Cleaver: My friend the Devil, A Memoir
By Marvin X

March 21, 2009

Introduction

Marvin X‘s newest book, “Eldridge Cleaver: My Friend, The Devil” is an important Expose!, notonly of whom his good friend really was… (I confess I thought something like that, in less metaphysical terms, from the day we met, at San Francisco State, 1967) But also of whom Marvin was/is. Now, Marvin has confessed to being Yacub, whom Elijah Muhammad taught us was the “evil big head scientist” who created the devil. (Marvin’s head is very large for his age.)

What is good about this book is Marvin’s telling us something about who Eldridge became as the Black Panther years receded in the rear view mirror. I remember during this period, when I learned that Marvin was hanging around Cleaver even after he’d made his televised switch from anti-capitalist revolutionary to Christian minister, denouncing the 3rd World revolutionaries and the little Marxism he thought he knew, while openly acknowledging beating his wife as a God given male prerogative, I said to Marvin, “I thought you was a Muslim” . His retort, “Jesus pay more money than Allah, Bro”, should be a classic statement of vituperative recidivism.

But this is one of the charms of this memoir. It makes the bizarre fathomable. Especially the tales of fraternization with arguably the most racist & whitest of the Xtian born agains with Marvin as agent, road manager, co-conspirator-confessor, for the post-Panther – very shot- out Cleaver. It also partially explains some of Cleaver’s moves to get back in this country, he had onetime denounced, and what he did after the big cop out. Plus, some of the time, these goings on seem straight out hilarious. Though frequently, that mirth is laced with a sting of regret. Likewise, I want everyone to know that I am writing this against my will, as a favor to Yacub.—Amiri Baraka. Newark, 5/13/09

Chapter 1

It all began at Soledad Prison, sometime during 1966. Black Dialogue magazine was approached by attorney Beverly Axelrod about making a visit to the Soledad Prison Black Culture Club. The editors agreed to make the visit, including myself as fiction editor. The other editors included Art Sheridan, Gerald, Aubrey and Peter LaBrie, Sadaat Ahmed, Joe Goncalves, Duke Williams, et al. We made our way down the coast to Soledad. I was both excited and sad because my brother Ollie was probably an inmate at the time, though I can't remember.

Our staff was taken to the hosting officer's apartment and briefed on what to do and not to do. No contact with inmates, no passing or taking of literature. We agreed but it didn't mean a thing. Soon as we got inside the meeting room we knew what we were going to do. At first we got inside and saw the brothers seated, with the meeting in progress. Eldridge was chair and his lieutenant was Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. Bunchy was a very handsome black man, so handsome it belied his leadership qualities as head of the Los Angeles Slauson gang.

But chairman Cleaver was a giant of a man, tell, light skinned and articulate. But more than the words said, I was immediately impressed with the organizational structure with brothers on post with military style discipline. It was probably the first time I'd seen black men so organized. We know now according to brother Kumasi that this was the beginning of the prison movement in California and the nation, this black culture club of mostly young black men confined to the dungeon as so many are today, causing havoc in black family and community life.

In this Soledad dungeon would come a prison movement on par with the black student movement, black arts, and black studies. As I listened to Chairman Eldridge speak, I said to myself this is a dangerous Negro if allowed to depart these walls. Clearly, he was well read after a total of eighteen years of confinement in the California Gulags. I would learn later he was soaked in Marxist Leninism and literature in general. And when Black Dialogue obtained his writings for publication, especially “My, Queen, I Greet You,” we suspected this was a man with the passion and writing skills of Baldwin. And of course he must have sensed this comparison and thus his need to denounce Baldwin to take a shot at the black literary crown, although he did it by a homophobic denunciation which led one to suspect his own sexual improprieties, especially after so long in prison.

But at that first meeting, we were humbled to be with the brothers, to share with them by reading our writings from Black Dialogue. At the end of the meeting we all embraced and exchanged materials in violation of the officer's request. We gave them copies of Dialogue and they gave us manuscripts of their writings which were later published in Dialogue and Journal of Black Poetry. As I said, we published “My Queen, I Greet You,” in Dialogue and Joe Goncalves published the poetry of Bunchy and others in JBP. We left Soledad and headed back up the coast to San Francisco. Thus was established a connection between the prison movement and black students, the black arts movement and eventually the Black Panther Party when I introduced Elbridge to Bobby Seale soon after his release from prison.

Chapter II

Several months passed before I met Eldridge again. Somebody called me to come over Sister Mary Anna's house. Maryanna Waddy was the daughter of painter Ruth Waddy, but more importantly, she was the student, though somewhat older at the time, who aggressively pushed for the name change from Negro Students Association to the Black Students Union. Maryanna was a strong black woman who took no jive, maybe the result of black consciousness taught by her mother. But when I entered her house, Eldridge was there trying to introduce his plans to the community.

There seemed to be some tension between him and Maryanna, a black man/black woman power battle. Maybe Maryanna knew about Eldridge's white woman lawyer, Beverley Axelrod, who had smuggled his manuscript Soul on Ice out of Soledad. We would learn that Eldridge had promised to marry her, so his blackness was suspect from the beginning—but we would handle that matter a few months down the road. Maryanna and most of those present, maybe members of the BSU, including those of us from Black Dialogue. If I recall correctly, Eldridge gave me a ride home and we agreed to meet again soon.

Things were going bad for us at Black Arts West Theatre on Fillmore Street, across the street from Tree's pool hall and around the corner from the Sun Reporter newspaper, published by the millionaire Communist Dr. Carlton Goodlett. BAW was breaking up because of egos and other psychopathic behavior in our crew which included Ed Bullins, Duncan Barber, Hillary Broadous, Carl Bossiere, and Ethna Wyatt. All of us wanted to make BAW happen but our egos got in the way, along with deeper mental problems. In spite of these problems, we did my plays and the plays of Ed Bullins. We had jazz concerts with the Bay Area's best, including Raphael Garrett, Monte Waters, Dewey Redman, Oliver Jackson, B.J., and others.
Only thing with the musicians, many had white women which we would not allow in the theatre, since we were black nationalists on the road to becoming members of the Nation of Islam. A long time criminal Muslim came to our theatre to recruit us, Alonzo Harris Batin, who became the guru and mentor of BAW. Batin was a criminal with a heart of gold. He wanted us to join the Nation even though most of the time he was not in good standing and considered a hypocrite. Soon we were indoctrinated by Batin and eventually most of us joined the Nation except Ed Bullins. Bullins was into his art and living or at least staying in the Beatnik area of North Beach.

For awhile, Ethna was the glue that held BAW together. She fed us when we were low on money to buy food. She would cook something that would be enough for the crew and she would try to stop us from killing each other as we ego-tripped. Ethna had come from Chicago, maybe during or around the time of that Summer of Love. It seemed many beautiful women fled Chicago to the West coast. Ethna's friend had come, Sandra Williams, helping out at BAW. Danny Glover acted in BAW, performing in Dorothy Ahmed's play Papa's Daughter, about incest. Actress and SFSU student Vonetta McGee performed in Bullins' play It Has No Choice and another play by Bullins that I can't remember the name.

And then one day the crew called me to the lobby of the theatre to meet a man they said spoke seven languages. After they called me several times to come to the lobby, I came from the theatre to meet a tall, jet black brother with straight hair, Ali Sharif Bey, who indeed did speak several languages, including English, Persian, Spanish, French, Arabic and Urdu. He became our on-site Islamic scholar and teacher, teaching us Arabic and his vast knowledge of Islam based on the Ahmediah sect, the great evangelists of Islam to the West. Ali Sharif Bey would surface later as the runner for the SLA when they kidnapped Patty Hearst. He is the source for my master thesis docudrama How I Met Isa.

But in spite of all this community support—none from the Black bourgeoisie until later at the Black House which Eldridge convinced me to help organize since I told him I was tired of the bs at BAW and was ready to do something different. We discussed setting up what eventually became Black House, a political/cultural center on Broderick Street off Divisadero in the Fillmore. Ed Bullins soon joined Eldridge, Ethna and myself. For a few months Black House became the cultural center of the Bay with thousands of conscious hungry black flocking there for culture. Black House participants included Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Toure, Chicago Art Ensemble, Sarah Webster Fabio, Reginald Lockett, Emory Douglas, Samuel Napier and Little Bobby Hutton. On the political side, Eldridge brought in a Communist party leader, Rosco Proctor.

Eldridge had no time for the culture, even though he couldn't help but be influenced by it since it was at the house he financed with his advance from Soul On Ice. He and Baraka had little to say to each other even though Baraka's Communication Project at San Francisco State College/now University, had its off campus base at Black House. Years later these two men would switch ideologies with Baraka turning Communist and Eldridge finding religion. Eldridge would eventually go from Communist to Christian, to Mormon to Moonie to Religious Science.

But at Black House he was strictly Communist and he pushed hard to get us to follow his path, though we resisted until Black House fell apart from ideological differences. Before it fell we had gone to Beverly Axelrod's house to literally remove Cleaver since we found it a contradiction for the chairman of Black House to be sleeping at the White House. One afternoon brother Batin and I made Eldridge move his things from the White House while Miss Ann cried. Among his belongings was that wicker chair, spear and rug made famous in that photo of Huey Newton.

Unity of Thought

Toward Unity of North American Africans
14. Unity in Thought


Our philosophical and ideological thought has been diverse and divergent, expressing a panorama of thinking since our sojourn in the wilderness of North America. As an expression of the Sisyphusian mythology, our thinking depended on how low or how high we ascended the mountain.
In our lowest moments, we wanted out of here, return to African or anywhere but here. In our more ascendant times, we strove to plant our feet on the solid ground of Americana, claiming every right due citizens in these United Snakes of America. But generally we have worn the persona of the schizoid personality, a painful balancing act between the blues songs of love and hate for our presence in Tobacco Road.

Integration, separation, migration, revolution, we have enjoyed a plethora of feelings, emotions and often the raw psychological depression derived from oppression. In our more positive times, we expressed a maniacal moment of elation before the depression set in as happened in the short lived post bellum, post emancipation period called Reconstruction.

The 19th century thinkers ranged from the militant writings of David Walker's Appeal, 1829, through the intellectuals involved in the black conferences throughout the century that included slave insurrections, back to Africa thinking, and the radical thinking of men like Henry Highland Garnett.

Some of these thinkers gave up on the American dream and tried to tell us we would never be free in Babylon. After 1827 with the publication of Freedom's Journal, the black press expressed our mood from then on. With the Civil War we envisioned a future of freedom, but virtual slavery returned after the short lived Reconstruction.

Booker T. Washington told us to cast down our buckets where we were, forget about integration and strive for economic progress, while others pleaded for full citizenship rights, among them W.E.B. DuBois, who saw race as the essential problem of America. DuBois saw a "talented tenth" leading the race to freedom.

Marcus Garvey had read the writings of Booker T. Washington in the African Times and Orient
Review, the paper edited by Duse Muhammad Ali, the man who mentored Garvey in London before he came to America to hook up with Booker T., who died before Garvey arrived.

Of course Garvey came to America indoctrinated with the Pan Africanism taught him by Duse Muhammad Ali, One God, One Aim, One Destiny, Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad.

Although DuBois became a champion of Pan Africanism and died in Ghana, Garvey implemented his black nationalist, Pan Africanist program, supposedly organizing six million people into the greatest organization of radical black thought preceding Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam.
Ironically, Negro intellectuals were Garvey's worse enemies and conspired to railroad him into prison, partly from jealousy and envy. After release from prison, he died a broken man in London, never landing on African soil.

World War I had given North American Africans a chance to see the world and again prove themselves in battle, although they returned to face race riots after fighting fascism abroad. Their thinking had expanded after the war and after they began the great migration from the Jim Crow South, aka the Cotton Curtain! In the North they encountered the thoughts of urban intellectuals, including DuBois and the NAACP civil rights thinkers. But there was also the philosophy of Noble Drew Ali, a precursor of Elijah Muhammad's brand of unorthodox Islam.
Noble Drew Ali must be listed among those mystic Negroes who originated a synthesis of thought from Islamic Sufism, Ahmedism and the new spirituality that had origins in the 19th century.

We must never forget the literature of the slave narratives, Muslim and Christian, especially the narrative of Frederick Douglas who gave us a vivid story of his path from slavery to freedom. His July 4th speech is a classic of black thought on the meaning of Independence Day to a North American African.

July 4, 1910, when Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion and behaved as a free man in every sense of the word, America responded with race riots of the kind never seen before or since, simply because Johnson claimed his manhood in the promised land and refused to play the role of the docile Negro. Because of Johnson's thinking and behavior, America invented a law to indict him called the Mann Act, though we call it the Black Man Act. Supposedly Johnson had crossed state lines with white prostitutes that he loved to race through the streets with in his expensive cars. What should our response be to the white man who has taken liberties with our women from day one til now.

But we should also be aware of female thought, such as the thinking and actions of Harriet Tubman, who said she could have freed more slaves if they had known they were slaves. And Ida B. Wells, who did all she could to stop lynchings throughout the land. And Queen Mother Moore, the Mother of Reparations. Angela Davis has long given her thoughts on the liberation of captives in the prisons and jails of America. We thank her because few men have addressed the topic, although Elijah Muhammad long called for the amnesty of men and women unjustly imprisoned in America. The Black Panthers followed up on this point as well.

Of course some of our greatest thinking has come from those men either in prison or released from prison, such as George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X and our greatest living prison philosopher , Mumia Abu Jamal.

For many black men, prison is the first time they get a chance to think. We shall be astounded to discover their thinking and writings, especially with so many of them locked down as we write.

Elijah said separation. Martin Luther King, Jr. said integration and civil rights. Malcolm said human rights, the ballot or the bullet. With Obama as President, we have obviously gone for the ballot, yet by the time he leaves office, we may be forced to consider the bullet.

For sure, our thinking has been unified around the theme of freedom and liberation. Our literature is essentially a slave narrative or how I got ova, how I survived. Amiri Baraka was asked at UC Berkeley what was his greatest accomplishment? He answered, "I survived!"

We cannot conclude this brief outline of our thought without reference to the underlying philosophy contained in the music, the spirituals, the blues, jazz, poetry and rap. For here we find the thought of common people, thus the common sense philosophic thought that made it possible for us to keep the faith, to endure the daily round. The music is thus a metaphoric comment on our general condition, sometimes personalized, sometimes politicized, but always a statement on our reality as a people in the Crazy House Called America.
--Marvin X
11/13/10

Elder Marvin X and POCC Chairman Fred Hampton, Jr. in Berkeley CA, July, 2011

Elder Marvin X and POCC Chairman Fred Hampton, Jr.

photo by Kamau Amen Ra, Berkeley CA, July, 2011