Marvin X in the Dirty South and East Coast

Marvin X at Khepera Books, Sat., 4pm

Marvin X will read and sign books tomorrow at Houston's Khepera Book Store. Brother Khepera, on the staff at Texas Southern University, has requested Marvin X hold a session based on his book How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, BBP, 2007. He was also requested to speak on his memoir of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver: My friend the Devil, BPP, 2009.

The event starts at 4pm. Marvin X may cut short his reading to attend the Texas Southern/Jackson State University football game!

Pictured above Marvin X and bookstore owner, Brother Khepera.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Marvin X at the Elders Institute of Wisdom

Pictured above: SHAPE community center founder Deloyd Parker, Elder Alvin C. Harriss, 88, and Marvin X


Today I had the honor to attend the weekly meeting of the Elders Institute of Wisdom at the SHAPE community center. As I arrived early, only a few people occupied the circle of chairs, but before long the room was filled with Elders of various ages, from 65 to the 90s. They possessed a variety of skills, from engineers, teachers, doctors, singers, poets, clothing designers, painters, social workers, nurses.

They continued drifting in while the meeting progressed. It began with a communal song led by a 91 year old blind woman, Mrs. Harris. At the end, Mrs. Harris was asked to recite a poem, but before she began everyone at the center was requested to come listen, including the young people who were preparing the food for lunch.

The facilitator informed the group that I was from out of town and the father of Nefertiti, a member of the SHAPE center. Everyone knew Nefertiti as the petite lady who looks like a young woman but is in her early forties. When we got home from a club last night, Nefertiti said, "Dad, why are these old men always hitting on me?" I said because they know you are an old soul. Maybe so, Dad, because all my friends are older women.

The facilitator asked me to tell the group about myself so I gave them some autobiographical information and the group seemed appreciative of my presence, but the atmosphere became charged when I told them about the Elders Council I attend in Oakland and our project of educating the community about preserving their archives, the letters, notebooks, scrapbooks, photos, leaflets, posters and other items acquired from our sojourn in the wilderness of North America.

The founder and director of SHAPE thanked me for bringing to their attention a vital project and demanded the group begin preserving their archives and informing their children and grandchildren about the value of archives.

Before the meeting ended with the poem by Elder Harris and my Parable of the City of God, the event had morphed into a concert by a local musician and a young opera singer, Lisa Harris, who brought her 88 year old grandmother for the first time.

As the meeting closed, the founder and  director of SHAPE, Deloyd Parker, a veteran of the black liberation movement, who participated in the Congress of African People, went around the circle acknowledging each person and telling a brief history of their lives. For a rare moment in my life, I was totally overcome with joy and happiness.
--Marvin X
Houston TX
9/13/12

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Marvin X Hits the Big H, Houston TX

The Wisdom of Plato Negro, parables/fables by Marvin X
Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2012
195 pages
$19.95

The Wisdom of Plato Negro, parables/fables is a post-modern version of the ancient tradition of story telling. Says Rudolph Lewis, "Marvin X has expanded contemporary literature. I suspect there is nothing like them in post-modern American literature." Ishmael Reed declares, "...If I had to pin down the influence upon Marvin X...I would cite the Yoruba texts: texts in the Yoruba language reveal that didacticism is a key component of the Yoruba story telling style.... Marvin X imparts wisdom by employing cautionary tales and uses his own life and mistakes to consul the young to avoid mistakes."

Schedule

Wednesday, September 12

3:50pm, interview on Min. Robert Muhammad's show Connect the Dots, KPFT, Pacifica Radio

6-9pm Cafe 4212, hosted by Brother Omuwali, Chair Emeritus, NBUF

Thursday, September 13

11am Elder's Council, SHAPE Community Center

Saturday, September 15

4pm, Book signing at Khepera Books

Tuesday, September 18

11am  University of Houston, Africana Studies Department

Wednesday, September 19

Interview with Zin on SOS, KPFT Radio

Thursday, Sept 20

Elders Institute of Wisdom

Saturday, Sept 22

Reading and Conversation with Nefertari at the Poetry Place, 9pm
Sunday, September 23

Book signing at Third World Imports

Call 510-200-4164 for more information

Other Tentative Venues

September

New Orleans

Community Book store

Beaufort, SC

Gullah Sentinel Newspaper

October/November

Washington DC

Howard University

Umoja House

Philadelphia

Elliot Bey's

Temple U.

Univ. of Penn

Marvin X at Khepera Books, Sat., 4pm

Marvin X will read and sign books tomorrow at Houston's Khepera Book Store. Brother Khepera, on the staff at Texas Southern University, has requested Marvin X hold a session based on his book How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, BBP, 2007. He was also requested to speak on his memoir of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver: My friend the Devil, BPP, 2009.

The event starts at 4pm. Marvin X may cut short his reading to attend the Texas Southern/Jackson State University football game!

Pictured above Marvin X and bookstore owner, Brother Khepera.

Marvin X at the Elders Institute of Wisdom

Pictured above: SHAPE community center founder Deloyd Parker, Elder Alvin C. Harriss, 88, and Marvin X


Today I had the honor to attend the weekly meeting of the Elders Institute of Wisdom at the SHAPE community center. As I arrived early, only a few people occupied the circle of chairs, but before long the room was filled with Elders of various ages, from 65 to the 90s. They possessed a variety of skills, from engineers, teachers, doctors, singers, poets, clothing designers, painters, social workers, nurses.

They continued drifting in while the meeting progressed. It began with a communal song led by a 91 year old blind woman, Mrs. Harris. At the end, Mrs. Harris was asked to recite a poem, but before she began everyone at the center was requested to come listen, including the young people who were preparing the food for lunch.

The facilitator informed the group that I was from out of town and the father of Nefertiti, a member of the SHAPE center. Everyone knew Nefertiti as the petite lady who looks like a young woman but is in her early forties. When we got home from a club last night, Nefertiti said, "Dad, why are these old men always hitting on me?" I said because they know you are an old soul. Maybe so, Dad, because all my friends are older women.

The facilitator asked me to tell the group about myself so I gave them some autobiographical information and the group seemed appreciative of my presence, but the atmosphere became charged when I told them about the Elders Council I attend in Oakland and our project of educating the community about preserving their archives, the letters, notebooks, scrapbooks, photos, leaflets, posters and other items acquired from our sojourn in the wilderness of North America.

The founder and director of SHAPE thanked me for bringing to their attention a vital project and demanded the group begin preserving their archives and informing their children and grandchildren about the value of archives.

Before the meeting ended with the poem by Elder Harris and my Parable of the City of God, the event had morphed into a concert by a local musician and a young opera singer, Lisa Harris, who brought her 88 year old grandmother for the first time.

As the meeting closed, the founder and  director of SHAPE, Deloyd Parker, a veteran of the black liberation movement, who participated in the Congress of African People, went around the circle acknowledging each person and telling a brief history of their lives. For a rare moment in my life, I was totally overcome with joy and happiness.
--Marvin X
Houston TX
9/13/12

Marvin X Hits the Big H, Houston TX

The Wisdom of Plato Negro, parables/fables by Marvin X
Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2012
195 pages
$19.95

The Wisdom of Plato Negro, parables/fables is a post-modern version of the ancient tradition of story telling. Says Rudolph Lewis, "Marvin X has expanded contemporary literature. I suspect there is nothing like them in post-modern American literature." Ishmael Reed declares, "...If I had to pin down the influence upon Marvin X...I would cite the Yoruba texts: texts in the Yoruba language reveal that didacticism is a key component of the Yoruba story telling style.... Marvin X imparts wisdom by employing cautionary tales and uses his own life and mistakes to consul the young to avoid mistakes."

Schedule

Wednesday, September 12

3:50pm, interview on Min. Robert Muhammad's show Connect the Dots, KPFT, Pacifica Radio

6-9pm Cafe 4212, hosted by Brother Omuwali, Chair Emeritus, NBUF

Thursday, September 13

11am Elder's Council, SHAPE Community Center

Saturday, September 15

4pm, Book signing at Khepera Books

Tuesday, September 18

11am  University of Houston, Africana Studies Department

Wednesday, September 19

Interview with Zin on SOS, KPFT Radio

Sunday, September 23

Book signing at Third World Imports

Marvin X will attend State of the Black World Conf.

Chairman Bobby Seale Defends Richard Aoki

Richard Aoki : Oakland town hall discussion defends controversial activist’s legacy (Review)

Published on Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Last updated on 12:20AM, Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Bobby Seale and Diane Fujimo. photo by Eric K. Arnold/EKAphotography

Richard Aoki wasn’t there to defend himself. But Bobby Seale was. 

After a couple of weeks of revelatory newspaper accounts of Aoki’s alleged stint as an FBI informant, Oakland’s Black Panther Party legacy seemed to shake on its very foundations. 

Aoki’s storied past, as the Panthers’ revered Asian-American comrade, was suddenly questionable. Generations of Asian-American activism, as well as the BPP’s multicultural reach, had seemingly been placed in jeopardy by the testimony of a dead government agent and a stack of declassified documents.

Seale wasn’t about to let all that go without a fight. Stepping up to the podium at Sunday’s East Side Arts Alliance’s town hall discussion, he offered a glimpse of the firebrand who founded the Panthers more than four decades ago. He regaled the standing room-only crowd – many of them veterans of the ‘60s-‘70s black liberation and Third World activist movements - with anecdotes from the BPP’s glory days, aided by liberal doses of his own mythology. Aoki, he said, was an integral force in the Panthers’ conception; back in the pre-BPP Merritt College days, it was he who told Seale where to find Huey Newton: “Down on 47th Street.”

Seale took the allegations as an insult. 

“It’s so personal. It’s a crying shame,” he said. “This … is about a defamation of my old colleague … Richard Aoki being a so-called snitch? Bulls--t.”

This was classic Seale: righteously indignant, verbose, gruff and charismatic. Peppering his stories with curse words, he recalled telling FBI agents who visited him to “get the f--- off my porch,” referred to “snatching the leather jackets” of wanna-be Panthers and upheld Aoki as nothing less than a blood brother.

Aoki, he said, had been named field marshal “at the very beginning of the Black Panther Party.” Seale confirmed that Aoki had given him and Newton weapons, at Newton’s request: “He gave Huey an M-1 carbine. He gave me a .45.”

Despite the Panthers’ militant stance - and their predilection for carrying guns - Seale claimed it was a “big-ass lie” that the group disliked non-violent protest. He noted that he once broke up a riot and that he had continually advocated for an electoral platform as a means of affecting meaningful societal change. “I don’t believe in riots,” he said. “I believe in organizing the community.”

Following Seale’s comments, ESAA’s Greg Morozumi told audience members they should think about the sources of information: “Anytime a sentence starts with ‘FBI says,’ you should question it.” After all, he said, the FBI were the architects ofCOINTELPRO - a program designed to infiltrate and discredit radical leftist groups “by any means necessary.”

The next speaker, Asian-American studies professor and author Diane Fujimo, was highly skeptical of basing an account of the history of Asian American political activism primarily on FBI sources. Fujimo maintained that Rosenfeld’s book “Subversives,” in which the allegations against Aoki were first named, failed to provide sufficiently detailed evidence of Aoki’s relationship with the government and distorted the context of 1968s Third World Strike, making Aoki the main focus. According to Fujimo, the actions at San Francisco State and University of California, Berkeley, were the result of collective leadership, which she called “one of the strengths of the Asian-American movement.”

Rosenfeld, she said, exaggerated incidents of violence by strikers against whites, while downplaying incidents of violence by police against strikers. She accused the journalist of selectively picking and choosing the information in his book, “to paint a picture of Aoki as violent.”

Fujimo noted that her own book, “Samurai Among Panthers,” examined the larger context behind Aoki’s involvement with the Panthers and the Third World movement, which included critiques of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam.

The bottom line, she said, was, “we need to control our own history.”

ESAA’s Maisha Quint referenced the SF8 case as evidence that the tactics employed by COINTELPRO were still happening today. The federal government, she said, was attempting to “cut off the line of knowledge” between older activists and the young generation.

Emory Douglas, a visual artist and former BPP Minister of Culture, brought a thick stack of papers with him – his FBI file, which he had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. It had taken him three and a half years, he said, to get his file, of which some documents were still classified. The FBI, he revealed, had once profiled him “as someone they could approach.”

Attempts to discredit the Panthers, Douglas said, included threatening letters mailed to community members by unknown individuals made to look like they came from the BPP.

In Douglas’ mind, the allegations about Aoki were nothing more than another “misinformation campaign.” For a freedom fighter, this was par for the course, he suggested. 

“All kinds of things like this come up," Douglas said. "You have to be prepared.”

Joan Tarika Lewis, the first female member of the Panthers, said she had been a friend of Aoki’s since 1967. Had Aoki been an informant, she claimed, “there would have been more than 28” – alluding to the Panthers killed since COINTELPRO’s advent, a number cited earlier by Seale.

No one on the panel believed the FBI account was credible in the least, especially given that this was the same federal agency whose leader once declared the Panthers’ free breakfast program “a threat to internal security,” as Seale noted.

Once the floor was opened for comments from community members, several former Panthers spoke up on Aoki’s behalf. Billy X, a member of the Black Panther alumni committee, called Aoki “a hero to this community,” noting that “Richard helped promoteBobby Hutton Day” – an event in honor of the teenage Panther killed by police in 1968 after an infamous shootout. Others noted that Aoki was involved in many Asian American activist organizations providing services to immigrant communities during the ‘80s and ‘90s.

There was only one voice of dissent during the discussion, when a woman who identified herself as the “child of Communists” said she was “uncomfortable with the notion (Aoki) couldn’t have been compromised.”

But the panelists remained firm that Aoki never undermined or attempted to destabilize the movement, insisting that his actions, over a long period of time, were inconsistent with that of a paid informant.

But if Aoki was an informant, what exactly did he tell the FBI? And how informed was the federal government about the full extent of his activities? Did they know he armed the Panthers? If so, were they complicit?

The answers aren’t found in Rosenfeld’s book, the articles naming Aoki as an informant or any of the declassified FBI documents released thus far.

As Morozumi said, “There are a lot of unresolved questions.”

by Eric Arnold for OAKLAND LOCAL

Marvin X National Tour begins in Houston